Digital
Art at ARCO - an indicator of the markets
of technological art products?
Reviewed by Marcus Neustetter
Director, The Trinity Session, The
Gallery Premises
Johannesburg, South Africa
mn@onair.co.za
After most workshop, discussion and exhibition
experiences of technology focused art
in the context of Europe, I return to
my context in South Africa and am stumped
for a few days in positioning these experiences
locally. While the exposure, the potential
for new partnerships and the intellectual
engagement is overwhelming, the local
practicalities and limitations redirect
my attention to the necessities, such
as practical survival and need for education
and development. Returning from ARCO and
its discussion forums, however, the transition
from a place with an active digital art
scene and strong contemporary art market,
to the local reality, was easier. The
vast challenges in the dysfunctional third-world
art industry, the sporadic and low-key
explorations and experimentations with
creative uses of technology, and the misappropriation
and misrepresentation of these activities
on the global platforms usually leave
me lobbying for more sensitive and inclusive
global processes at platforms, such as
ARCO.
What helped address the contextual gap
of difference was the question that Gerfried
Stocker posed to the invited panelists
on the discussion forum Directions
of Digital Art, challenging
opinions on the future of digital art.
How do we see the future of digital art?
This brought forward fundamental issues
of the very term digital art, classification
of the medium and criteria that seems
to define this mode of production.
Particularly exciting in the responses,
especially by the panelists representing
a point of view from the developing contexts
(such as, homogeneously described as,
Africa, South America, India), in my opinion,
was the simultaneous diversity and similarity
in the presented environments, the experiences,
approaches, and the logical deductions.
Ideas around self-organization, survival,
education, and community were present
in various presentations of these individual
speakers, creating exciting links for
unpacking and evolving questions of locally
relevant approaches and applications.
This was juxtaposed by contemporary artistic
examples and historical reflections by
artists and historians, which alluded
to a return to the simple reflection on
the processes of engaging with a system
(be it the context of a society, a technology
or modes of communication), interacting
and enabling audiences, and acknowledging
artistic intention as a definition of
an artwork.
The resulting discussion presented perspectives
on this openly defined space of digital
art in relation to the contemporary art
industry. This also highlighted new communities,
audiences and markets that come with the
domain of new technologies.
With the overburdened question, Is
it art?, presenting itself towards
the end of the discussion of the position
of digital art, the exciting aspect to
this particular exchange was that beyond
the conference hall it was being dealt
with practically at the ARCO exhibitions.
While an exhibition series was taking
place at the Centro Cultural Conde Duque,
presenting an impressive curation of digital
culture, such as the high-end Digital
Transit exhibition (ARS Electronica and
Medialabmadrid), interesting meeting points
of art and new technologies found their
ways into the halls of ARCO. Not only
did the Blackbox act as a platform and
the Telefonica Foundation exhibition present
their new media prizewinners, but digital
artworks could be seen amongst the more
traditional media in various gallery stands.
After the panel I was interested to find
out more about these works that were appearing
within this art market platform. After
several discussions it became clear that
these artworks were, in fact, being traded
in the art-market beyond the specialist
galleries, such as Bitforms in New York.
I was not only pleased to hear this in
response to the above-mentioned discussion,
but also in my personal position around
the necessity of market development for
the digitally focused artworks.
Usually this type of exposure just reminds
me of the vast gap in my local industry,
larger than the digital divide, a gap
between the art and its underdeveloped
markets. A gap that makes me question
the survival of digital art that wants
to emerge as technology becomes more accessible
and prolific, but currently has no industry
to tap into or develop. So, I return to
South Africa after my discussions with
my fellow panelists and an experience
of ARCO, and I find that while the gap
will remain in the near future, the very
nature of the discussions in this forum
and the inclusion of the digital artworks
in the context of the traditional art
industry gives me hope that the production
of digital art will become not only an
item of trade but also one that in itself
can too develop new markets in the art
industry through its technological networks
and inclusive communities.