| OBJECT VERSUS PIXELS | |||||||||||||||||
What is a picture? A hallowed materialization of the imagination that has to be shielded from harm? A recollection inscribed in the memory that knows no other form than an untraceable arrangement of brain cells and differences in potential? Can a picture be two things, an inviolable object and an illusion at the same time?
The question is all the more relevant now that art is made with growing frequency of such intangible "materials" as journeys or telephone calls and in the "virtual" space of computers. What is the artistic status of pixels on the screen: objects or illusions? Isn't the whole concept of art hopelessly inadequate to do justice to the realm of creative ideas that lead to such surprising but often unstable results in contemporary visual culture and in the new media? From the perspective of the traditional practice of art, art and the digital media seem to be incompatible. To start with, or so one often hears, the fundamentally "reproductive" nature of the digital media can not endure the essentially "autonomous" character of traditional art. This Benjaminesque dichotomy between the original and the copy is however only part of the problem. Perhaps this opposition obscures even more than it clarifies.
The misunderstanding is embodied in practical linguistics. Whoever puts a picture on the Net "copies" it, and whoever sends it all across the globe "copies" it onto countless computers... The word "copy" conceals the fact that each and every "copy" is identical to the "original." It is a mixup of image and contents, since behind the picture on the screen and under the pixels it is composed of, there is a structure whose precise formulation is only known to its creator - a poetry of algorithms that can be read as a direct translation of the coded contents. The pixels that are the visible outcome of these contents bear a different relation to their source than the physical objects of traditional art. In the virtual reality of the computer, abstract ideas like "structure" and "concept" are as tangible as the objects on the screen. The creative processes that steer the world of pixels can not be addressed without considering the comparable processes elsewhere in our visual culture, in films, advertisements, television and other mass media. And in the end, in these environments as well, the primate of creativity is just as valid as in "autonomous" art.
The most challenging pictures in today's culture come from contexts outside traditional artistic practice: the complex interactivity and breathtaking images of DOOM, the provocative campaigns of Benetton, the existential fragmentation of Tarantino's films, the artistic implications of the techno-moralism of Bill Gates ... All these "objects" play a role, or should, in contemporary art history. Without the expansion of the concept of art to these environments, art is at a dead end. From this angle, one of the aims of this conference is to open up a new route for art and art criticism: a bridge between objects and pixels. |
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