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The Work of Art in a Digital Age: Art, Technology
and Globalisation
Melissa Langdon
The Work of Art in a Digital
Age: Art, Technology and
Globalisation
1 3
ISBN 978-1-4939-1269-8 ISBN 978-1-4939-1270-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4939-1270-4
Springer New York Heidelberg Dordrecht London
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014942866
© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
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Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
Melissa Langdon
University of Notre Dame
Australia
v
Preface
Globalisation is one of the most important phenomena of our times, and yet one of
the least understood. In popular and critical discourse there has been a struggle to
articulate its human affects. The tendency to focus upon macro accounts can leave
gaps in our understanding of its micro and particular experiences. This book argues
that globalisation’s spatial, temporal, and kinetic changes are impacting upon indi-
vidual bodies and consciousnesses.
Digital art is introduced as a platform of articulation: a style borne of globalisa-
tion’s oeuvre and technically well-equipped to converse with its flows. Digital art
works are explored through an historical lens to show how they share similar discur-
sive functions with earlier art forms. The capacity to re-centre globalisation around
the individual is explored with reference to sensory works that encourage subjective
and experiential encounters.
By exploring globalisation through digital art, this book moves away from uni-
versal and totalising approaches, in favour of personal and affective accounts. It
shows how digital art can offer individual expressions of globalisation. Through
discussing a wide array of international artworks that feature immersive, interac-
tive, haptic and responsive technology, digital art’s tools of articulation are exam-
ined. This book reveals how digital art works can facilitate new articulations of
globalisation: as enactments and modes of expression.
vii
The amazing growth of our techniques,
the adaptability and precision they have
attained, the ideas and habits they are
creating, make it a certainty that profound
changes are impending in the ancient craft
of the Beautiful.1
Walter Benjamin
1 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in H. Arendt (Ed.),
Illuminations, Fontana, Collins, 1970.
ix
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without the involvement of a number of
key people.
I am extremely grateful to all the artists that provided me with permission to share
their works. In particular, I would like to thank: Marnix De Nijs, Elaine O’Hanrahan
on behalf of Desmond Paul Henry, Christian Moeller, Joachim Sauter, Wolfgang
Ammer, Justine Cooper, Ross Mawdsley, ®™ark, The Yes Men, Neil Brown, Den-
nis Del Favero and iCinema, Nicholas Golebiewski, Shoba, Nicholas Golebiewski,
PHAT, Beat Streuli, Tom Otterness, Andy Diaz Hope, Abbey Williams, Cristian Al-
exa, Brian Alfred, Josephine Starrs, Leon Cmielewski, Blast Theory, Justine Coo-
per, Marnix de Nijs, Kaho Abe and Jung Sin, Joanna Berzowska, Kevin Macdonald,
Ibrahim Hamdan, Lara Baladi, Forest and Kim Starr.
The feedback received from David Savat and Ian Saunders, during the comple-
tion of my doctorate informed a number of the approaches and ideas that were later
developed in this text. Thank you for this support. My editor Hector Nazario also
provided valuable input and guidance, which made for a far more lucid and read-
able text.
This book has been written over endless cups of coffee. Thank you to the cafés
that allowed me to sit writing at their tables, sometimes for hours: Gertrude and
Alice Book Café and Paris Le Go Café in Bondi NSW, The Reid Library Café at the
University of Western Australia, Bookplate Café at the National Library, ACT and
Greens and Co in Leederville, WA.
My family have given the greatest support, particularly Tom who has provided
invaluable input and suggestions throughout the writing process. To you, my love
and thanks. From sourcing articles to debating ideas, my father John was an inspira-
tion. I dedicate this book to him—for giving me a lifetime of education—and an
education for life.
xi
1 Introduction: Towards New Understandings ............................................ 1
Introduction .................................................................................................. 1
The Approach ............................................................................................... 4
Digital Art as a Critical Language ................................................................ 7
Chapter Summary ......................................................................................... 8
2 Digital Art and Cultural Commentary .................................................... 13
Introduction ................................................................................................ 13
Art and Technological Change ................................................................... 13
Digital Art Terminologies ........................................................................... 16
Art and Cultural Critique ............................................................................ 19
The Production of Art ................................................................................. 20
Art and Digital Technology ........................................................................ 22
Situationist Art ............................................................................................ 25
Art and Attention Economies ..................................................................... 27
Open Art ..................................................................................................... 28
Interactivity and Criticism .......................................................................... 30
Affective Art ............................................................................................... 32
Conclusion .................................................................................................. 34
3 Globalisation and Digital Art ................................................................... 37
Introduction ................................................................................................ 37
Structuralist Approaches ............................................................................. 37
The Universal and the Particular ................................................................ 40
Deconstructive Discourses ......................................................................... 41
Ethnographic Approaches ........................................................................... 42
Global Flows .............................................................................................. 44
Affective Readings ..................................................................................... 49
Conclusion .................................................................................................. 51
Contents
xii Contents
4 Digital Art and Political Revolt ................................................................ 53
Introduction ................................................................................................ 53
Enactments of Global Revolt ...................................................................... 53
®™ark ........................................................................................................ 57
The Yes Men ............................................................................................... 59
Globalisation and Political Protest ............................................................. 62
Cultural Imperialism ................................................................................... 63
Ideological Revolt ...................................................................................... 63
Net.Art Style ............................................................................................... 65
Political Critique ......................................................................................... 69
The Centre and the Periphery ..................................................................... 70
Conclusion .................................................................................................. 72
5 Global Space, Time and Speed: T_Visionarium II
and Beijing Accelerator .............................................................................. 73
Introduction ................................................................................................ 73
The Construction of T_Visionarium II ........................................................ 73
The User Turned Artist ............................................................................... 75
Spatial, Temporal and Kinetic Flow ........................................................... 78
Globalisation and Affective Experience ..................................................... 80
Beijing Accelerator ..................................................................................... 80
Conclusion .................................................................................................. 84
6 Metropolis: Imagining The Global City ................................................... 85
Introduction ................................................................................................ 85
Constructing the City .................................................................................. 86
Shoba: Blowing Zen .................................................................................... 88
Nicholas Golebiewski: This is Where I Live ............................................... 90
PHAT: Harlem: The Ghetto Fabulous ........................................................ 92
Beat Streuli: Pallasades 05-01-01, 2001 .................................................... 93
Tom Otterness: Nine Eleven ....................................................................... 95
Andy Diaz Hope: Financial District Infiltration:
Everybody is Somebody’s Terrorist ............................................................. 96
Abbey Williams: YES ................................................................................. 99
Cristian Alexa: 10-Second Couples .......................................................... 101
Brian Alfred: Overload ............................................................................. 103
Conclusion ................................................................................................ 104
7 In the Line of Flight: Changing Practices in Digital Art ...................... 107
Introduction .............................................................................................. 107
Global Collaboration ................................................................................ 109
Leon Cmielewski and Josephine Starrs: Floating Territories .................. 110
Blast Theory: Can You See Me Now? ....................................................... 112
Justine Cooper: Transformers ................................................................... 114
Marnix De Nijs: Run Motherfucker Run .................................................. 117
xiiiContents
Kaho Abe and Jung Sin: Haptic Glove ..................................................... 120
Joanna Berzowska: Intimate Memory Shirt/Feathery Dresses ................. 122
Conversations on Globalisation ................................................................ 124
Conclusion ................................................................................................ 126
8 Digital Art and Social Engagement ........................................................ 129
Introduction .............................................................................................. 129
Kevin Macdonald: Life in a Day .............................................................. 129
Social and Political Messages .................................................................. 130
Global Production ..................................................................................... 132
Social and Political Effectiveness ............................................................. 133
Ibrahim Hamdan: Images of Revolution ................................................... 134
Criticism of Online Campaigns ................................................................ 134
Digital Media as a Social Barometer ........................................................ 135
Achieving Social and Political Change .................................................... 136
Lara Baladi: Alone, Together…In Media Res ........................................... 138
Social and Political Engagement .............................................................. 139
Social and Political Effectiveness ............................................................. 140
Art and Environmentalism ....................................................................... 141
Chris Jordan, Midway: Message from the Gyre ....................................... 142
Active Art ................................................................................................. 144
Conclusion ................................................................................................ 145
9 Conclusion: Digital Art as a Platform of Articulation ......................... 147
Introduction .............................................................................................. 147
Digital Art as Art ...................................................................................... 148
Digital Media as a Humanising Technology ............................................ 150
Looking Forward ...................................................................................... 152
Selected Bibliography .................................................................................... 155
1
Chapter 1
Introduction: Towards New Understandings
M. Langdon, The Work of Art in a Digital Age: Art, Technology and Globalisation,
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4939-1270-4_1, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Introduction
Globalisation and digital art are complex phenomena. Because of their historical
coincidence, they can be used to inform understandings of each other, with each
having the potential to function as an affective and experiential construct. Concep-
tualisations of globalisation have dramatically changed in response to the rise of
digital technology. Writers have engaged with the spatial and temporal conditions
of what has been variously termed the ‘network society’.1 This book explores these
altered conditions and posits that new languages are required to articulate globalisa-
tion’s individual affects. It reveals how digital art can function as a loupe for observ-
ing and expressing globalisation, as a human phenomenon (Fig. 1.1).
The presentation of globalisation as a human and ‘felt’ phenomenon is a criti-
cal breakthrough in the understanding and conceptualisation of globalisation. It is
important because it provides new ways of accessing difficult concepts often dis-
cussed in large-scale, systemic and intangible ways. In popular media and texts,
globalisation is often expressed in terms of the expansion of financial markets, the
proliferation of Western capitalism, the growth of global consumption and the rise
of Americanisation. As Jonathon Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo argue, there is a
strong pattern of thinking about globalisation ‘principally in terms of very large-
scale economic, political, or cultural processes.’2
Many popular readings present globalisation as being synonymous with Ameri-
canisation and the rise of advanced capitalism. These articulations are often centered
upon the idea that ‘the United States is the dominating global nation, powerful to a
degree and to an extent never before seen.’3 As Clark Judge claims in the Hoover In-
1 See: Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Cambridge, Mass., Blackwell Publishers,
1996.
2 Jonathon Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo (Eds.), The Anthropology of Globalisation: A Reader,
Malden, Blackwell Publishing, 2002, p. 5.
3 Clark S. Judge, ‘Hegemony of the Heart: American cultural power threatens old orders world-
wide,’ Hoover Institution Policy Review, No. 110, Vol. Dec-Jan, <http://www.hoover.org/publica-
tions/policyreview/3462301.html>, 2002, (accessed 12 October 2008).
2 1 Introduction: Towards New Understandings
stitution Policy Review: ‘[a]gain and again in everything from the pronouncements
of statesmen to the chants of anti-globalization demonstrators to the manifestos of
terrorists, a fourth factor of American power keeps coming up … This elusive fac-
tor is American cultural power.’4 A core assumption underlining this view is that
Americanisation underpins globalisation.
Equally, the term ‘globalisation’ is often interchanged with Western capitalism.
As BBC News reported, the debate on whether globalisation is simply ‘capitalism
at its most evil or a promising way to reduce poverty is now raging wherever world
leaders gather to discuss trade or economic issues.’5 However, both positions are
underscored by senses of globalisation as an economic transformation, occurring
after the post-Second World War boom came to an end.6 Several writers, such as
Robert Went, present it as a distinctly new stage of capitalism.7 Yet, the categorisa-
tion of globalisation in macro economic terms draws the focus away from micro
experiences and articulations.
The reduction of globalisation to a series of generalised, systemic impacts over-
shadows the contradictions and iterations of human encounter, experience, memory,
and response. This text challenges meta-narrative approaches of globalisation that
have inhibited understandings of personal and individuated experiences. Influ-
enced by Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi’s reluctance to define or delimit
4 Clark S. Judge, ‘Hegemony of the Heart,’ <http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyre-
view/3462301.html>.
5 No author, BBC News,‘Globalisation: Capitalist Evil or a Way Out of Poverty?’ BBC News:
Talking Point, 6 February 2002, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/1791105.stm>, 2002,
(accessed 12 October 2008).
6 Robert Went, The Enigma of Globalisation: A Journey to a New Stage of Capitalism, London,
Routledge, 2002, p. 93.
7 Robert Went, The Enigma of Globalisation, p. 93.
Fig. 1.1 Marnix De Nijs,
Beijing Accelerator, 2006.
(Image courtesy of the artist,
2006)
3Introduction
globalisation,8 it seeks find new ways of ‘knowing’ this ‘unclassified topic’9 by
presenting the phenomenon as a series of flows rather than a single system.
When understood in this way, globalisation necessitates a method that is fluid
in its facilitation of different voices and expressions, as reflected by the diverse
artworks selected. This approach is sympathetic to Okwui Enwezor’s notion that
the ‘value of the global paradigm for me—if it means serious interaction with art-
ists and practices that are not similarly circumscribed—is its allowance for greater
methodological and discursive flexibility.’10
A key rationale in writing this book is to facilitate more personalised understand-
ings of globalisation. By exploring how different artworks engage participants in
conversations with globalisation, it seeks to provide far less totalising accounts,
framed by notions of engagement and affective experiences. To this end, the book
will explore perceptual and intuitive approaches to art and technology, which might
facilitate what Shauna M. MacDonald terms ‘new modalities of reflection.’11 In
a review of Susan Kozel’s Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology,12
MacDonald engages with more nuanced and cross-disciplinary approaches to expe-
riential digital works. She observes how Kozel, in particular, is able to effectively
mediate ‘multiple, complex concepts (i.e., flesh, the virtual) of (sometimes) diver-
gent thinkers from diverse disciplines (i.e., dance, philosophy, performance, art,
robotics, feminism) and even paradigms (i.e., art, science, technology).’13
The aim of this book is to encourage open and flexible discussions around glo-
balisation’s human impacts, which counter universalist approaches. International
digital artworks will be explored in terms of how they express these micro affects
through interactive, immersive and responsive media. This book will show how
digital art, as a practice shaped by globalisation, has an ability to express its human
impacts, and to present it as a dynamic cultural phenomenon.
In the following chapters globalisation will be discussed in terms of how it in-
fluences the way we think about and respond to the world. Globalisation’s spa-
tial, temporal and kinetic flows will be described in terms of personal experiences
and articulations. Articulation in this context is used to refer to the dual processes
of voicing and connecting, or as Alison Kooistra expresses, ‘of joining together
and in the sense of speaking out’.14 Kooistra argues further that an ‘anatomical
articulation—the joining together or “membering” of distinct parts to form a larger
whole—is accomplished through a verbal articulation—speaking out, claiming a
8 See: Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Eds), The Cultures of Globalization, Durham, Duke
University Press, 1998.
9 Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Eds), The Cultures of Globalization, p. xi.
10 Okwui Enwezor, ‘Global Tendencies: Globalism and the Large-Scale Exhibition’, in Art Forum
International, Vol. 42, No. 2, November 2003, p. 154.
11 Shauna M. MacDonald, ‘Book Review: Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology’,
Vol. 5, Issue. 1, 2007, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, <http://liminalities.net/5-1/
rev-closer.html>, 2007, (accessed 16 March 2012). This link is no longer active.
12 Susan Kozel, Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology, Mass., MIT Press, 2008.
13 Shauna M. MacDonald, ‘Book Review’, <http://liminalities.net/5-1/rev-closer.html>.
14 Alison Kooistra, ‘Speaking into Sight: Articulating the Body Personal with the Body Politic’,
Explorations in Anthropology, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2008, p. 1.
4 1 Introduction: Towards New Understandings
label or banner, or constructing a coherent narrative.’15 This book introduces digital
art as a style that shares an intimate history with globalisation, and one that is tech-
nologically equipped to facilitate new understandings of the phenomenon. Digital
art will be located in continuity with—not in rupture from—earlier art forms. This
marks a shift in the consideration of digital art, and challenges the tendency in digi-
tal art criticism to locate these works as essentially ‘new media’ works distinctly
borne of the new millennium period.
As ‘art of the times’ digital art can provide lens for the viewing and contempla-
tion of globalisation. In historical terms, it is well placed to comment upon the
particular conditions and human responses brought about by globalisation. It also
operates as an instance of globalisation, emerging from its flows of media and tech-
nology. Unlike other forms of static art, it is technically equipped to emulate global-
isations dynamic spatial, temporal and kinetic affects. Digital artists are converting
passive art spectators into active users. Through tactile, interactive and responsive
media, participants experience globalisation’s replicated and at times, contradictory
effects: temporal dislocation, human connection, sensory overload, urban accelera-
tion, remembrance of home and a sense of global action and citizenship. In this way,
digital art might be seen to serve a similar function to Situationist works that used
their particular social and historical locations and palettes of techniques to chronicle
the times.
Key works from around the world will be used to show how digital art can reveal
individual enactments of life under globalisation. To this end, digital art will be read
as both an expression, and an element, of new global flows. Its ontological and af-
fective qualities that connect it to the realm of art will be seen as creating new ways
of understanding the external world, and articulating happenings and responses to
globalisation. At the same time, this book contends that meta-narrative accounts are
unable to account for the subjective nature of art production and human experience.
The same partiality is reflected in the way that works are approached and inter-
preted by the author in this book.
The Approach
This text is constructed as a two-way conversation between globalisation and digi-
tal art. The objective of this book is not to provide categorical definitions for these
terms, but to generate conversations around these concepts, informed by digital art
examples. In keeping with this open and flexible approach, each chapter will draw
upon discourses from cultural studies, media theory, communications and art his-
tory, framed by the sense that some of the more illuminating accounts have emerged
from cross-disciplinary enquiry, with writers such as Okwui Enwezor, Marc Augé,
Arjun Appadurai and Saskia Sassen employing eclectic discourses and approaches
in their explorations of globalisation.
15 Alison Kooistra, ‘Speaking into Sight’, p. 1.
5The Approach
Historical analysis will be used to contextualise digital artworks and their meth-
ods of production. While the nature of globalisation’s impacts has historical prec-
edents, the book will argue that the scale is unprecedented. By focusing upon the
new millennium period, this text will suggest a need to address key changes in the
style of digital art production in connection with the consciousness of globalisation
and its histories. Senses of fin-de-siècle before and after the Millennium’s turn,
and the heightened awareness of globalisation and digitisation’s cultural, political,
technological, ideological, and economic impacts will be explored. By confront-
ing the eclecticism and vibrancy of digital art, the book aims to offer new insights
into why digital art operates as an affective platform for describing responses to
globalisation.
A case study approach is used to enable the artworks to be sequenced histori-
cally, and to draw attention to key dialogues that are informing understandings of
globalisation and digital art.In its purest form, case study research involves an itera-
tive process of collection, contexualisation and analysis. By its nature, digital art
lends itself to this form of induction. Given the unique ways in which individuals
experience and describe art, the scope for generalist or constructivist theories seems
limited. The artworks will be presented as individual constructions rather than gen-
eral accounts, and will be examined in terms of the different perspectives offered on
globalisation’s human impacts and their moments of production.
Each chapter explores digital art in terms of a particular theme emerging from
current discourses, for example, art and cultural commentary; political protest; or
space, time and speed. The examples have been deliberately chosen and sequenced
to reveal an historical and stylistic progression in the practice of digital art, and new
conecptualisations of globalisation. They will be explored in terms of their produc-
tion methods and references to other art practices. Artworks from diverse locations,
employing eclectic media, and constructed in different cultural contexts will be dis-
cussed. In this way, the book aims to provide a more critical and readable account of
digital art and its development in connection to globalisation. Ultimately, this book
poses the question: what understandings of globalisation can digital art provide?
This text will also contest the claim that digitisation produces only detrimental
affects: an assumption that underscores fears that the ‘unremitting flood of numbers,
codes, letters’16 is ‘replacing real bodies and real persons, threatening to make both
obsolete’,17 as conceptualised by Anna Munster and also expressed by Jean Baudril-
lard in terms of the real being ‘no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and
of simulation’.18 In her text Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information
Aesthetics, Munster posits that ‘[t]hought about the body and actual sensory par-
16 Anna Munster, ‘Low-Res Bleed: Congealed Affect and Digital Aesthetics’, in Australian and
New Zealand Journal of Art, Volumes 2–3, 2001–2002, p. 82.
17 Anna Munster, ‘Low-Res Bleed’, p. 82.
18 Mark Poster (Ed.), Selected Writings by Jean Baudrillard, Stanford, Stanford University Press,
2001, p. 175.
6 1 Introduction: Towards New Understandings
ticipation and engagement must be re-examined in our analysis of digital culture.’19
This book will contend that these generalised readings offer reduced or simplistic
understandings of globalisation’s variable and often contradictory human affects.
This text will also disrupt the notion that digital media is hostile to the body or
necessarily borne of a hard, masculine and de-sensitising technology. Or as Mun-
ster expresses, new media technologies are held to be responsible for privileging
consciousness over embodiment in virtual environments, or for favouring the hu-
man over the machine in the design of ‘computer interfaces.’20 It will explore the
rejection of the idea that ‘in its obsession with developing a “machine” aesthetic
digital artwork might stand accused of neglecting affective, aesthetic experience’,21
and instead show how many digital artists are engaging with sensory, perceptual
and bodily experience in their art. Artists like Joanna Berzowska, Jung Si, Kaho
Abe and iCinema will be discussed in terms of their use of technology to present
qualities of softness, tactility, sensuality and femininity. As such, digital art will be
shown to have the means to generate affective and particular critiques of globalisa-
tion.
In using the term ‘affect’ this book focuses upon subjective and bodily responses
to globalisation and art. Affective approaches create space for the shifts, iterations
and contradictions of human responses, in ways that counter static, universal or
objective methods. To this end, we might use Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s
‘rhizomatic’ languages to account for the ‘variation, expansion, conquest, capture,
[and] offshoots’22 of affective encounter, as a construct that is ‘always detachable,
connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its
own lines of flight.’23
Simon O’Sullivan converses with Deleuze’s conceptualisations by arguing
‘[w]hat we’re interested in, you see, are modes of individuation beyond those of
things, persons or subjects.’24 In his article ‘The Aesthetics of Affect’, O’Sullivan
explores Deleuze’s notion further that ‘[t]his is art’s function: to switch our intensive
register, to reconnect us with the world.’25 He contends that the spectator might be-
come an active participant that is engaged with an artwork at the level of representa-
tion. To this end, we are ‘involved in a dance with art…and art does what is its chief
modus operandi: it transforms, if only for a moment, our sense of our “selves” and
our notion of the world.’26 O’Sullivan similarly engages with Félix Guattari’s notion
19 Anna Munster, Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics, Dartmouth
College Press, New Hampshire, 2006, p. 10.
20 Anna Munster, Materializing New Media, p. 10.
21 Anna Munster, ‘Low-Res Bleed’, p. 78.
22 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 21.
23 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 21.
24 Simon O’Sullivan, ‘The Aesthetics of Affect: Thinking Art Beyond Representation’, Angelaki:
Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 6, No. 3, 2001, p. 128.
25 Simon O’Sullivan, ‘The Aesthetics of Affect’, p. 128.
26 Simon O’Sullivan, ‘The Aesthetics of Affect’, p. 128.
7Digital Art as a Critical Language
that ‘by allowing individuals access to new materials of expression, new complexes
of subjectivation become possible…In such a pragmatic, and aesthetic, reconfigura-
tion one creates new modalities of subjectivity in the same way an artist creates new
forms from a palette.’ This is the function of aesthetic affect. To this end, digital art
might facilitate affective encounters with globalisation, as an interactive mode of
articulation (Fig. 1.2).27
Digital Art as a Critical Language
A further objective of this book is to offer new understandings of digital art, as an
expressive language that can be contextualised in terms of art history. Digital art
has been variously termed net.art, new media art, media art and new media, with
each category re-orienting the practice according to technical, aesthetic or stylistic
concerns. Whether we see digital art as being evolutionary to or revolutionary from
earlier art styles, what is clear is the need to develop a means for locating it. This
is particularly so if we agree with Mark Hansen that the formal traditions of art
theory and criticism have limited application for the articulation of digital works.28
Arguably, the intimate and experiential natures of digital artworks can provide chal-
lenges for those seeking to locate them. Formal categorisations of art governed by
strict notions of authorship, aura and originality, seem to preclude an art character-
ised by replica, misappropriation, freedom of access and anonymity.
In contesting these formal tenets, digital works often subvert conventional requi-
sites for production, artistry, and display. Digital artists often oppose formal notions
27 Simon O’Sullivan, ‘The Aesthetics of Affect’, p. 131.
28 Mark B.N. Hansen elaborates on this idea in his text New Philosophy for New Media, Cam-
bridge Mass., MIT Press, 2004, p. 3.
Fig. 1.2 Forest and
Kim Starr, Chick with
Marine Debris at East-
ern Island: Midway
Atoll, 2008. (http://www.
starrenvironmental.com/
images/image/?q=080605-
6576&o=birds)
8 1 Introduction: Towards New Understandings
of artistry with its makers ‘biologists, engineers, designers, and hackers rather than
the newest crop of fine-arts graduates.’29 As Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito observe,
‘[f]ar from the traditional epicentres of artistic production and distribution, creative
people sitting at computer keyboards are tearing apart and rebuilding society’s vi-
sion of itself.’30 These writers question whether the boundaries have ‘become irrel-
evant in an age when art and science, commerce and fashion are whipped together
in the global culture blender we call the Internet?’31 While the practice of defining
art may seem problematic or irrelevant, the function of digital art still serves a criti-
cal purpose.
This book shows that there are strong grounds for locating digital works as art,
for they creatively converse with the external world in ways that are reminiscent of
earlier practices and styles. Digital art’s ability to critically reflect upon social, po-
litical, and historical phenomena—and generate new ways of seeing—is an essen-
tial characteristic of social art. Rather than abandoning the category of art or placing
digital works on the outer, we might expand the field to account for different and
emergent modes of expression. This step has been a necessary process for all novel
and revolutionary styles throughout history, ranging from Modern cinema to Dada
performance. In the face of formalist dissent, artists have engaged with the backlash
and incorporated the criticism into their works. It is this engagement and resistance
that has often made works understandable as art, and provided grounds for applying
understandings from art history.
In choosing the term ‘digital art’ this book seeks to provide less a definition
and more a language for locating creative works mediated by digital technology
in one of three ways: as the product, process or subject thereof. Digital artworks
incorporate eclectic media from interactive film and video to gaming and wearable
technology. As a broad category of classification, digital art incorporates any ex-
pression mediated by digital technology. The computer, it will be argued, is central
to production, operating as an interface, facilitator and/or canvas for display. How-
ever, unlike technological determinist accounts it will be contended that digitisation
influences rather than determines the message. Digital art will be located in continu-
ity with—and not in rupture from—earlier artistic discourses and styles.
Chapter Summary
Through a case study approach that features diverse artworks from around the
world, the book will elaborate on how digital art is technically, philosophically and
historically apposite to critique globalisation’s flows. It will link this expressive
platform to the realm of affect and show how digital artists can facilitate subjective
interpretations and bodily responses, and voice diverse experiences and perspec-
29 Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito, At the Edge of Art, London, Thames and Hudson, 2006, p. 7.
30 Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito, At the Edge of Art, p. 7.
31 Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito, At the Edge of Art, p. 7.
9Chapter Summary
tives on globalisation. Each chapter will engage with different digital art works and
explore the possible intentions of the artists. In challenging universal accounts, this
book will uncover particular and differentiated artistic accounts of globalisation.
Each chapter will feature works that engage with current dialogues on globalisation
and digital art practice. The introduction of each chapter will also provide an expla-
nation of why the art has been chosen, and how it might inform understandings of
digital art and globalisation
Chapter 2: Digital Art and Cultural Commentary, shows how digital art can
offer sensory, affective and particular articulations of globalisation. It explores
digital art’s emergence in connection to earlier interventions in art and technology.
Through re-tracing previous practices, digital art’s capacity to offer novel forms
of cultural commentary and critique will be analysed. Art’s expressive and affec-
tive qualities will be explored, in relation to how reactions might be generated in
response to social and political phenomena as well as conceptualisations of affect.
Through engaging with writers such as Walter Benjamin, Lev Manovich, and Dar-
ren Tofts, the platform of digital art will be explored, located and contextualised.
In doing so, this book will argue that digital art forms a continuation with earlier
art discourses and practices. Through examining preceding styles a comparative
framework of analysis will be introduced and an argument established for locating
digital art in continuity with earlier expressions.
Chapter 3: Globalisation and the Crisis of Articulation provides cultural and
political contexts for framing key examples of digital art. In examining some of
the difficulties associated with the articulation of globalisation, this book will dis-
cuss different readings and engage with Appadurai’s construction of globalisation
as a series of flows.32 In Chap. 2, the conversation on globalisation will be opened
up with the suggestion made that new means of articulating the phenomenon are
required. Chapter 3 builds upon the previous chapter, which shows how digital art
might operate as that critical voice.
The fourth chapter of this book examines some of these more radical articula-
tions. Through a focus on ‘Digital Art and Political Revolt’, it analyses protests to
globalisation by early digital artists such as Ross Mawdsley, ®™ark and The Yes
Men, who works are seen to represent these expressions. In this chapter, the use of
digital tactics to oppose Western political leaders, Non Government Organisations
(NGOs) and multi-national corporations are examined. The artists’ use of Internet,
television, and street campaigns to generate global revolt will be discussed, as will
their strategic infiltrations of virtual and physical spaces. Ross Mawdsley, ®™ark,
and The Yes Men’s art are situated and contextualised in terms of earlier expres-
sions of resistance, with critical questions posed such as: how is digital technology
being used in backlash to globalisation? And, what are the discourses that inform
these accounts? The legitimacy of tactics such as spoofing, hacking, impersonation
and sabotage will be examined. This chapter also discusses local enactments of
global movements and critiques of ‘glocalised’ political campaigns.
32 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Culture Economy’, Theory, Cul-
ture, and Society, Vol. 7, 1990, pp. 295–310.
10 1 Introduction: Towards New Understandings
Chapter 5: ‘Global Space, Time and Speed: T_Visionarium II and Beijing Ac-
celerator moves forward from the idea of political revolt to examine spatial and
temporal enactments of globalisation in digital art. It considers iCinema and Marnix
de Nijs’ interactive installations as key works that converse with global flows of
space, time and speed. This chapter explores the role that graphical user interfaces
(GUI) can play. Both installations feature transcriptive narratives, which enable the
participant to simulated spatial, temporal and kinetic flows. Affective, responsive
and participatory technologies engage users on bodily levels. Both artworks are
contextualised in terms of the dialogues on globalisation and digital art, established
in Chaps. 2 and 3.
The sixth chapter Metropolis: Imagining the Global City continues the conversa-
tion established in the previous chapter through exploring a key space: the global
city. This chapter will argue that the global city operates as an important site for the
manifestation of urban change, influenced by the rapid movements of people, ideas,
ideologies and finance. Using the exhibition Metropolis as an indicative point of
reference, eight artists’ perceptions of life within North American cities will be ex-
amined. The artworks discussed are: Shoba’s Blowing Zen (2003), Nicholas Gole-
biewski’s This is Where I Live (2003), Tom Otterness’ Nine Eleven (2003), Cristian
Alexa’s Ten-Second Couples (2000), Abbey Williams’ YES (2002), Andy Diaz Hope
Financial District Infiltration: Everybody is Somebody’s Terrorist (2004) PHAT’s
Harlem: The Ghetto Fabulous (2004).
In some of the works, such as Diaz Hope’s Financial District Infiltration: Ev-
erybody is Somebody’s Terrorist (2004), the global city is seen to intensify senses
of alienation. In others, such as PHAT’s Harlem: The Ghetto Fabulous (2004),
the city is shown to localise ethnic difference: offering opportunities for solidarity
and revolt. The Metropolis artists punctuate their works with human responses to
globalisation, underscored by themes such as the nature of individuality in a glo-
balised world, human flow and dispalcement, social fragmentation and suspicion,
and belonging and connection. Constructed as private and intimate articulations of
globalisation, these works implicitly counter universal or totalising accounts of glo-
balisation through offering disparate and at times contradictory accounts by diverse
international artists.
Chapter 7: In the Line of Flight: Changing Practices in Digital Art will exam-
ine a global exhibition held in synchrony with a symposium in Beijing. One of the
reasons that it has been included in this book is to showcase how digital artworks
are being exhibited, and to explore curators’ perspectives on digital art, and how it
might offer new perspectives on globalisation. To this end, the inclusion of In the
Line of Flight and its sequencing in the book is designed to enable direct compari-
sons to be made to the Metropolis exhibition discussed in Chap. 6. Secondly, this
chapter highlights the eclectic approaches that have informed the conceptualisations
of digital art that are explored in Chap. 3. The exhibition featured an eclectic array
of digital art formats, from video games to responsive garments and haptic instal-
lations. The exhibition reflects the different degrees to which artists are identifying
changing practices in art, and engaging with those realities in their works will be
examined. Lastly, the organisation of the exhibition was itself a global endeavour.
11Chapter Summary
Through incorporating artists and participants from around the world, it exemplifies
the new ways that art is being made, shared and exhibited in a global age.
The eight examples that this chapter focuses on reveal divergent perceptions of
globalisation’s flows. These include Blast Theory’s Can You See Me Now? (UK,
2001–2007), Justine Cooper’s Transformers (Australia, 2002), Marnix de Nijs’
Run Motherfucker Run (Netherlands, 2004), Joanna Berzowska’s Intimate Memory
Shirt and Feathery Dresses (Canada, 2004), Jung Sin and Kaho Abe’s Haptic Glove
(USA, 2004), and Leon Cmielewski and Josephine Starrs’ Floating Territories
(Australia, 2004).
The artworks presented in the exhibition In the Line of Flight raise questions
about the nature of art collaboration, production and display under globalisation.
Themes explored: the cultural influence of North America and the West, the move-
ment of individuals globally, the virtualisation of communities, and the rise of the
global city, as a cultural manifestation of globalisation. Each example raises ques-
tions about the politics of art display, and the role of digital technology in facilitat-
ing creative communication, collaboration, and construction. ‘In the Line of Flight:
Changing Practices in Digital Art’, reflects upon shifting digital art practices and
promotes new understandings of globalisation’s human impacts, as subjectively in-
terpreted by different artists.
Chapter 8: A Brave New World: Digital Art and Social Engagement moves be-
yond the previous chapters to explore global digital artworks produced between
2009 and now. Kevin Macdonald’s 2011 film Life in a Day, Ibrahim Hamdan’s 2011
film Images of Revolution, Lara Baladi’s 2012 installation Alone, Together… In
Media Res, and Chris Jordan’s 2009-current Midway series is discussed in terms of
social, political and environmental issues that they raise. The chapter explores how
artists are using their works to put out ‘calls to action’. The question of how digital
art can effect real change in the physical world will be examined.
13
Chapter 2
Digital Art and Cultural Commentary
M. Langdon, The Work of Art in a Digital Age: Art, Technology and Globalisation,
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4939-1270-4_2, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Introduction
This chapter establishes grounds for perceiving digital art as a critical voice—one
that can facilitate both personal and affective responses to globalisation. It posits that
digital art is borne of a turbulent era, sharing an intimate history with globalisation.
This chapter shows how art can function as a platform for cultural commentary. It
also provides means for considering and contextualising the digital art case studies
presented within the text (Fig. 2.1).
The first part of this chapter foregrounds the emergence of digital art through
discussing art’s capacity to articulate and respond to, technological change. Digital
art is contextualised in terms of earlier styles of expression, ranging from Modern
cinema to 1960s technological art. The impacts of digitisation and the Internet upon
artistic production, experience and display are then examined. This chapter explores
how digital art both challenges—and confirms—earlier artistic practices and dis-
courses. It also shows how digital technology can be used to generate diverse styles
of art, with varying levels of interactivity and immersion.
Art and Technological Change
Some seventy years before the advent of digitisation, Walter Benjamin observed
how ‘the work of art of the Dadaists became an instrument of ballistics. It hit the
spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality.’1 Their
art generated affective responses to emotive subjects such as war, class conflict and
political change. Feelings of shock and repulsion were often conjured by Dadaism
and Situationism. These movements continue to influence digital works of art, with
disjunction and self-reflexion often apparent.
1 Gene Youngblood, ‘A Medium Matures: Video and Cinematic Enterprise’, in Timothy Druckrey
(Ed.), Ars Electronica: Facing the Future, Cambridge Mass., MIT Press, 1999, p. 63.
2 Digital Art and Cultural Commentary14
As cultural theorist Frederic Jameson observed, Modern expression presented
‘fragmented senses of the world.’2 One Modernist technique that features strongly
in digital art is montage. Montage emerged as a form of cultural backlash in its
critique of conservative bourgeois tastes. It was deliberately ‘ugly, dissonant, bohe-
mian, sexually shocking’.3 Using irony and irreverence, many Modern artists coun-
tered the neo-Platonic ideals of their predecessors, namely the notion that art should
capture aesthetic ‘truth’ and the sublime. Artists like Marcel Duchamp reflected this
dissidence in his work through manipulating or destroying their art materials.4
As Lisa Saltzman writes, Modern art—like digital art—was irrevocably tied to
its moment of production. The devastation of World War I produced some art that
was ‘driven in its acts of repression and denial to re-create itself according to an
idealized notion of the past rather than create itself anew after acknowledging and
mourning its losses.’5 However, artists and filmmakers like Pablo Picasso and Fritz
Lang used feelings of destitution despair as catalysts for innovation. Picasso’s paint-
ing Guernica and Lang’s film Metropolis, for example, appeared as what cultural
theorist Guy Debord termed ‘art in the epoch of its dissolution’6 or ‘the pure ex-
2 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in H. Foster (Ed.), The Anti-Aesthet-
ic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Seattle, Bay Press, 1983, p. 114.
3 Fredric Jameson, ‘PostModernism and Consumer Society’, p. 124.
4 Lev Manovich, ‘The Death of Computer Art’, <http://www.thennetnet.com/schmeb/schmeb12.
html>.
5 Lisa Saltzman, ‘Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siecle Europe—Book Review’, Find Articles,
<http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0422/is_n4_v78/ai_19178144/pg_6>, 1996, (accessed18
April 2007).
6 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, (Trans. Black and Red), Detroit, Black and Red, 1983,
p. 30.
Fig. 2.1 Joanna Berzowska, Intimate Memory Shirt, 2005. (Image courtesy of the artist)
Art and Technological Change 15
pression of impossible change.’7 In similar ways, many digital artists use Modern
principles of disruption, civil disobedience, dislocation and juxtaposition create an-
ti-aesthetics, which challenge traditional Academy art. Andrew Darley argues that
digital technology ‘tends much more to foreground itself as a technique within the
work itself—thereby linking itself to anti- or counter-realist forms’.8
Another way that digital art responds to earlier practices is through the incor-
poration of political protest, and adaptation of popular media ranging from poster
art to advertising, film and photography. Modern cinema, in particular, has strong
resonances with digital art. Geraldine Pratt and Rose Marie San Juan contend that
Modern cinema shows some of the earliest articulations of virtual, immersive and
experiential affects. The writers see strong similarities between Modern film and
digital expression, arguing that
cinema and cyberspace produce comparable effects of dislocation and disembodiment,
arguably privileging the visual as a way to simulate proximity without physical presence,
and thus transforming the relationship between subject and object of viewing in particular
ways.9
Michael Heim shares this view, in claiming that
[e]xiting a movie theatre resembles somewhat the exit from a virtual world. After hours
immersed in screen adventures, you emerge from the dark to blinding bright daylight. The
sensory shock brings with it a residual emotional tone aroused by the film.10
While Pratt and San Juan describe digital impacts in terms of Modern film elements
such as detached proximity and disembodiment, many digital artists show to the
contrary, how digital technology can re-engage the body, through conjuring senses
of physical immersion, interaction and intimacy. Joanna Berzowska’s tactile and re-
sponsive garments—explored in detail in Chapter Seven—show digital technology
to be personal, sensory and feminising.
Mark Nunes posits that the awareness of digitisation’s spatial, temporal and ki-
netic impacts is comparable to earlier technological responses. In his text Cyber-
spaces of Everyday Life,11 Nunes offers an analysis of analogue and digital tech-
nological affects. He compares the development of the British mail service to the
rise of email, in terms of popular shifts in the cognition of nearness, distance and
space.12 Yet despite similarities, the scale of digital affects is unique. It is a key dis-
tinction to make, because it establishes one argument about the comparative nature
of digital and analogue affects, and another about the level of impact.
7 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 30.
8 Andrew Darley, ‘The Digital Image in the Age of the Signifier’, in Andrew Darley (Ed.), Visual
Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres, London, Routledge, 2000,
p. 131.
9 Rose Marie San Juan and Geraldine Pratt, ‘Virtual Cities: Film and the Urban Mapping of Virtual
Space’, Screen, Vol. 43, No. 3, 2002, p. 250.
10 Michael Heim, Virtual Realism, New York, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 54.
11 Mark Nunes, Cyberspaces of Everyday Life, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
12 Mark Nunes, Cyberspaces of Everyday Life.
2 Digital Art and Cultural Commentary16
The Modern concept of art ‘happening’ and generating physical responses is
resonant with digital art. The digital collaboration iCinema, for example, employ
earlier principles of space, time and narrative in their works, which are then re-
formulated through digital technology. In their installation T_Visionarium II, which
is closely examined in ‘Chapter Five’, high levels of interaction, immersion and
response confront the user. A generative surround sound system, tactile and respon-
sive interface and evolving graphical system, which is sensitive to the user’s line of
sight, enables T_Visionarium II to transcend the limits of Modern cinema, through
transforming the physically passive art spectator into an active user.
Digital Art Terminologies
Just as the isolation of digital expression from the field of art is problematic, so
is the elevation of it to a separate domain. This action would reflect technological
determinist assumptions, underscored by the sense that media art is fundamentally
different or ‘new’. This notion pervades the writings of Marshall McLuhan and Lev
Manovich, and is evident in early net.art expressions, explored further in Chapter
Four. As a formalist idea, technological determinism privileges digital form over
content, valuing digital media for its own sake. It is shaded by the ideal that digital
art is a novel and form of creative expression. Technological determinist accounts
view analogue and ‘old school’ formats as static, outmoded and corrupt. Digital
media triumphs as the vanguard technology: capable of exhilarating speeds.
Lev Manovich writes that ‘those of us who work with digital art often debate
another convergence – the convergence between art world and computer world’.13
Manovich creates a binary between what he terms ‘Duchamp-land’ and ‘Turing-
land’,14 and argues that in Duchamp-land, an art object is defined by the criticism
it provokes, which can be prompted by its ‘literally destructive attitude towards its
material, i.e., its technology’.15 ‘Turing-land’, however, is diametrically opposed.
It emphasizes the digital medium rather than the message. As opposed to Duchamp-
land, Turing-land works tend to lack irony in their critique of art mediums, for ‘ob-
jects in Turing-land take technology which they use always seriously’.16
In reflecting upon Technological Determinist productions, Patrick Lichty ob-
serves how they often harbour the assumption that ‘the present is a bore, and it takes
too long for projects to get out of beta. The acceleration of culture demands the con-
13 Lev Manovich, ‘The Death of Computer Art’,< http://www.thennetnet.com/schmeb/schmeb12.
html>
14 Lev Manovich, ‘The Death of Computer Art’, <http://www.thennetnet.com/schmeb/schmeb12.
html>
15 Lev Manovich, ‘The Death of Computer Art’, <http://www.thennetnet.com/schmeb/schmeb12.
html>.
16 Lev Manovich, ‘The Death of Computer Art’, <http://www.thennetnet.com/schmeb/schmeb12.
html>
Digital Art Terminologies 17
sumption of ideas at their peak of freshness.’17 To the digital determinist, the pure
innovation and exhilaration of technology is the message in itself, with analogue
technology rendered static, outmoded, and corruptible. In works such as Mawd-
sley’s Simian series, digitisation triumphs as the vanguard technology: capable of
excessive speeds as it cuts through space and time. However, the exhilaration of the
media is often at the expense of the critical message.
Writers like Anna Munster and Geert Lovink, however, advocate approaches
that negotiate divisions between subjects and objects. In conversation with Lovink,
Munster perceives what she terms ‘media art’, as a fluid and distributed aesthetic.
However, the contention that digital expression is not art—as indicated by Manov-
ich’s essay ‘The Death of Computer Art’18—is problematic, for it prescribes what
art is or should be. Such claims, argue Munster and Lovink, require ‘a rethink of
aesthetics beyond the twinned concepts of form and medium that continue to shape
analysis of the social and the aesthetic.’19 By removing digital art from its contexts
of production, Technological Determinism isolates the medium from the message.
Through simply claiming that the medium is the message, such theorists privilege
digital form over content. In challenging Technological Determinist approaches,
this book locates digital art in continuum with earlier art discourses and expres-
sions. Globalisation is similarly conceptualised in relativist terms, which connect
current conditions to previous moments in time.
Terms like ‘new media’ arguably wittingly sever art’s ties in declaring that digi-
tal expression belongs to a different practice, discourse, time or technology. This
‘newness’ severs digital art from past expressions and aligns it with what Donna
Haraway describes as a ‘Twenty-first century technoscience and technoculture are
nothing if not frontier practices, always announcing new worlds, proposing the nov-
el as the solution to the old, figuring creation as radical invention and replacement,
rushing toward a future that wobbles between ultimate salvation and destruction but
has little truck with thick pasts or presents.’20 Technological determinists often extol
the innovation of digital technology, rendering analogue a redundant or obsolete
format: static, outmoded and corruptible.
In his use of the term ‘New Media’,21 Lev Manovich for example ascribes a dis-
tinct novelty to the form. Yet, as Richard L. Richards contends, ‘[m]ost new media
have been developed in dialogue with existing “old” and established media forma-
17 Patrick Lichty, ‘Alpha Revisionist Manifesto’, Nettime, <http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Ar-
chives/nettime-bold-0105/msg00391.html>, (accessed 01 July 2003).
18 Lev Manovich, ‘The Death of Computer Art’, <http://www.thennetnet.com/schmeb/schmeb12.
html>.
19 Geert Lovink and Anna Munster, ‘Theses on Distributed Aesthetics. Or, What a Network is
Not’, Fibreculture eJournal, Issue 7, <http://www.journal.fibreculture.org/issue7/issue_7munster_
lovink.html>, 2005, (accessed 12 December 2005).
20 Donna Haraway, ‘Speculative Fabulations for Technoculture’s Generations: Taking Care of Un-
expected Country’, (Tender) Creature Exhibition Catalogue, Alava, Artium, < http://www.patri-
ciapiccinini.net/essay.php>, 2007, (accessed 16 March 2012).
21 The term is used throughout Lev Manovich’s text The Language of New Media, Cambridge
Mass., MIT Press, 2001.
2 Digital Art and Cultural Commentary18
tions such as cinema and television’.22 He argues that any examination of digital
technology in light of ‘previous models of technological change’23 will ‘blunt any
facile notion of “newness”’.24 By omitting the adjunct of ‘art’, Manovich’s term
locates digital expression outside the realm of art. Darren Tofts suggests, the term
‘new media’ favoured by Lev Manovich assumes that digital media ‘lacks prede-
cessors’.25 Equally, the alignment of the medium to the message imposes a distinct
causality, limiting the potential for digital art to be art as opposed to media. Hansen
explains that it is not ‘simply that the image provides a tool for the user to control
the “infoscape” of contemporary material culture, as Manovich suggests, but rather
that the “image” has itself become a process and, as such, has become irreducibly
bound up with the activity of the body.’26 An artist may use digital technology to
convey a message but from there, the message may transcend the medium to ex-
press outside ideas such as the affects of globalisation upon the individual.
While Munster and Lovink use terms such as ‘new media art’ and ‘new media
theory’, Tofts disengages with the notion of novelty. In his classification of digital
media he omits the descriptor ‘new’ and chooses the phrase ‘media art’.27 In doing
so, he creates possibilities for comparative artistic discourse while acknowledging
new forms of art. Through contextualising digital expression in terms of earlier art
discourses and strategies, Tofts provides a relative framework for articulation.
However, Tofts argues that the term ‘digital art’ is far too reductive in ‘fore-
grounding the computer as the decisive factor in the art-making process’. Yet, clear-
ly digital technology informs its production, experience, history and conceptualisa-
tion. ‘Digital art’ is consistent with other artistic terms that invoke a technology,
such as video art, creative writing, printmaking and painting. One problem with his
terminology, however, concerns his choice of the word ‘media’ in his classification
‘media art’. ‘Media’ is a general term used to describe various mass communica-
tion formats, from television to radio and newspapers. The category of ‘media art’
also provides no way of distinguishing between digital and analogue works, for ex-
ample. Some theorists question the value of that distinction, instead viewing digital
technology as a continuation of earlier formats. Yet, the differentiation is critical, if
we view digitisation as affecting the production, experience, and understanding of
digital art.
22 Richard L. Richards, ‘Review of Dan Harries (Ed.), The New Media Book’, The Association
of Moving Image Archivists, <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/the_moving_image/v004/4.1edwards.
html>, 2004, (accessed 28 April 2006).
23 Richard L. Richards, ‘Review of Dan Harries’, (accessed 28 April 2006).
24 Richard L. Richards, ‘Review of Dan Harries’, (accessed 28 April 2006).
25 Darren Tofts, Interzone: Media Arts in Australia, Melbourne, Craftsman House, 2005, p. 9.
26 Mark B.N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, p. 10.
27 Darren Tofts, Interzone, p. 9.
Art and Cultural Critique 19
Art and Cultural Critique
Installations like Marnix de Nijs’ Run Motherfucker Run also engage with the idea
of art responding to contemporary cultural and political events. To this end, digital
works may be reminiscent of Frankfurt School art, which instigated new forms of
creative opposition in seeking to tear down regimes and foster new ways of think-
ing. Under the auspices of Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurt School invoked Marxist
discourses in seeking to unite art, politics and technology.28 Writers such as Walter
Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Leo Lowenthal and Herbert Marcuse were concerned
with the social, political and economic conditions that influenced and repressed,
practices of art. In their expression of cultural phenomena, Frankfurt School theo-
rists reflected dual senses of articulation: as both speaking about and connecting
to the world. Through connecting art and cultural commentary, Frankfurt School
artists and theorists negotiated artistic limits, and provided new modes of cultural
critique (Fig. 2.2).
Walter Benjamin’s notions of mechanical reproduction and industrial design also
surfaced in Frankfurt School art. Corporate motifs were ironically used in their
backlash against stifling political and economic conditions. Adorno’s adaptation
of Thorstein Veblen’s theories of consumption reiterated Marx’s analyses of West-
ern capitalist political economies. He engaged with the idea that in an era of mass
consumption, art is marred by constraints imposed by the cultural power brokers.
In his critique of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Adorno highlights many of
these tensions between mass culture and art production. Huxley’s text, Adorno
claims, exemplified the ways in which homogenisation was beginning to ‘massify
and destroy individual thought and action.’29 Under these conditions, the principles
28 John A. Walker, Art in the Age of Mass Media, Third Ed., London, Pluto Press, 1983, p. 3.
29 Douglas Kellner, Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern
and PostModern, London, Routledge, 1995, p. 75.
Fig. 2.2 Marnix de Nijs, Run
Motherfucker Run, 2004.
(http://www.marnixdenijs.nl/
run-motherfucker-run.htm)
2 Digital Art and Cultural Commentary20
of ‘Community, Identity and Stability’,30 Adorno notes, ‘came to replace the three
ideals of the French Revolution.’31
Art and cultural theories of the Marxist tradition challenged political and eco-
nomic foundations. Schneider Adams observes how as ‘early as 1857 − 1859, in his
Introduction to the Critique of the Political Economy, Karl Marx argued for tying
art to the culture that produced it’,32 based upon the premise that the production of
art was influenced by social and political contexts. Marx’s opposition to the formal-
ist ideal of ‘art for art’s sake’ was evident through his concern for production, and
the social and economic contexts influencing content. As Schneider Adams states,
‘[f]or Marx, art did not belong in an ivory tower inhabited by aestheticians, but
rather in the larger context of society and the economic historical process.’33 This
sense is apparent in the theatre of German playwright Bertolt Brecht. In emphasis-
ing the importance of the message over medium, he suggested that artists had a
responsibility to provide cultural critiques, with art functioning as something more
than just aesthetic form.34 Marxist theorist Ernst Fischer also championed that ‘art,
if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its
social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.’35
This is one of the key tenets of Walter Benjamin’s theory that art functions as a
‘political commodity’.36
The Production of Art
Mechanical art’s focus upon content—as opposed to form, aura and originality—is
pertinent to digital art. In ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc-
tion’, Benjamin shows how art produced through ‘mechanical’ or industrial means,
might oppose formal assumptions of authorship, originality and aura. In making
these claims, he suggests the capacity for technological expressions to be artistic
and termed ‘digital art’, as opposed to ‘graphic design’, ‘video’ or ‘multimedia’.
Benjamin’s understanding of mechanised forms of art is centred on the idea that
once it is replicated through technological means, such as film or photography, it
has the capacity to reach mass audiences and have unprecedented large-scale social
and political impacts. By expanding the category of art to include new kinds of ex-
30 Douglas Kellner, Media Culture, p. 75.
31 Douglas Kellner, Media Culture, p. 75.
32 Laurie Schneider Adams, The Methodologies of Art: An Introduction, Boulder, Westview Press,
1996, p. 59.
33 Laurie Schneider Adams, The Methodologies of Art, p. 59.
34 Laurie Schneider Adams, The Methodologies of Art, p. 60.
35 Laurie Schneider Adams, The Methodologies of Art, p. 62.
36 Laurie Schneider Adams, The Methodologies of Art, p. 63.
The Production of Art 21
pression, Benjamin arguably ‘detailed a shift in the function and ontology of art in
the age of technical reproducibility’.37
Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’,38 discusses the liberation of art from traditional concepts of aura,
originality, authenticity, and authorship. By exploring mechanical art and the prin-
ciple of replica, he subverts constructed formal boundaries of artistry, production
and display. Through articulating art in terms of its surrounding cultural and politi-
cal contexts, Walter Benjamin perceives mechanical art’s capacities for self-reflex-
ive critique. Through conversing with an industrial backlash to the ‘academies’ of
Western Europe, Benjamin engages with wider questions concerning the nature of
art, production, and cultural change. Benjamin’s questions about the place of art in
the industrial era are pertinent to the conceptualisation and location of digital art. As
the following chapters show, digital artists are engaging with new technologies—as
means of production—within their works.
In a return to Walter Benjamin’s notion of the creative industrialist, digital artists
are transcending formal categorisations and the traditional binary of artist/critic.
Digital collectives such as Rhizome, ISEA, Critical Art Ensemble and Ars Electron-
ica have also affected the practice by providing ‘buffer zones’ between art and dis-
course. New collaborations between artists, designers, programmers and academics
challenge traditional notions of artistic production. In a return to the Benjaminian
notion of the creative industrialist, Enwezor observes how ‘on occasion artists are
able to compete with computer researchers, rather than simply creating new demos
for commercial software, thus functioning as “memes” for computer industry.’39 Art
and artistry, under these conditions, transcends the fixity of formal categorisations.
The collaborative involvement of artists, designers, programmers and academics
has also challenged traditional notions of authorship.
However, Okwui Enwezor claims it is ‘the artist who decides what an object of
art is or what it can be, not simply the progressive, formal, transformation of art
inside of the medium of art.’40Enwezor proposes that the artist that should lead the
interpretation of their work. This interpretation challenges the role of the Academy
(or established galleries and academic institutions) in influencing aesthetics, values
and taste, and determining what art is or may be. To this end, the notion of ‘art as art’
is valid when viewed purely as form, and in isolation from the realms of personal
meaning, context, and experience. But according to Enwezor, when we perceive ‘art
as meaning’, we gain a new language for expressing often inaccessible phenomena,
such as globalisation and digitisation. However, we might also create space for art
audiences to subjectively determine meanings. While art offers external languages
derived from criticism and artists’ intents, it also generates internal responses. The
37 Mark B. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, p. xx.
38 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’.
39 Lev Manovich, ‘The Death of Computer Art’, (accessed 03 June 2004).
40 Okwui Enwezor, ‘The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent
Transition’, Research in African Literatures, Vol. 34, Issue 4, 2003, p. 58.
2 Digital Art and Cultural Commentary22
perceptions and reactions of the experiencer are important. This is particularly so
for tactile and interactive digital works, which seek to generate affective responses.
Art and Digital Technology
One way in which digital expression converses with earlier forms of art is through
self-reflexive engagement with its moments of production. The conversations cre-
ated by contemporary digital works reveal conflicting perceptions of the Internet,
its origins and the cultural impacts of digital technology. While the emergence of
the Internet is debated, it is often linked to Joseph Licklider’s notion of a network
formed of globally connected computers.41 Licklider headed a computer research
program in October 1962, which would form the basis of the United States’ Ad-
vanced Research Projects Administration (ARPA) and the development of ARPA-
NET in 1969.42 The computer system was a complex network that would retain nu-
clear weapon control in the event of a Communist strike. ARPANET was designed
so that if any element were destroyed, the remaining parts would retain operational
autonomy for counter-attack.
While ARPANET is often attributed as the first global Internet, many of the ideas
that influenced its inception can be found in earlier writings, to include Leonard
Kleinrock’s 1961 PhD proposal Information Flow in Large Communication Nets–
a paper that describes connected communication networks.43Despite conflicting
accounts of the Internet’s origins, its association with the military administration
ARPA may explain early perceptions of digital space as strategically structured,
regulated and controlled. This sense underscores Rita Raley’s notion that the com-
puter is emblematic of a controlled society.44 While this claim will be explored in
relation to the art of Ross Mawdsley, ®™ark and The Yes Men in the following
chapter, other artists have engaged with more open constructions of the Internet.
In challenging the formal structures of distribution, criticism, and display, some
1960s interventions in art and technology asserted critical independence through
challenging the limits of art and technology. During this period, figures like Des-
mond Paul Henry were actively experimenting with art and digital technology.
Henry created ‘drawing machines’ that produced early versions of digital art. The
artistic group Fluxus were also mixing different technologies and exploring ideas of
41 Vinton G. Cerf et al., ‘A Brief History of the Internet’, Internet Society, <http://www.isoc.org/
internet/history/brief.shtml> n. d., (accessed 06 December 2007).
42 Vinton G. Cerf et al., ‘A Brief History of the Internet’, <http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/
brief.shtml>.
43 Leonard Kleinrock, ‘Information Flow in Large Communication Nets’, RLE Quarterly Progress
Report, Cambridge Mass., MIT Press, 1961.
44 Rita Raley, ‘Statistical Material: Globalisation and the Digital Art of John Klima’, in The New
Centennial Review, Vol. 3.2, 2003, p. 69.
Art and Digital Technology 23
technological and artistic control. These artists explored the use of diverse technolo-
gies, and sought to legitimise mixed media works as art.45
Andreas Huyssen describes how the
[i]mplicit dependence on a traditionally structured system…which is put under erasure by
the Fluxus event, is perhaps best expressed in what Adorno called the increasing ‘Verfran-
sung der Kunste.’46
Adorno’s concept of Verfransung—or entanglement of boundaries—disintegrated
traditional structures and merged artistic practices, creating a ‘sense of evolving dis-
solution, of aesthetic entropy, a reciprocal emptying out of traditions, a loss of form
and truth content.’47 By rebuking the formal structures of distribution, criticism, and
display, 1960s interventions in art and technology re-asserted their critical indepen-
dence through challenging the limits of art and technology. Huyssen contends that
45 Andreas Huyssen, ‘Back to the Future: Fluxus in Context’, in Janet Jenkins (Ed.), In the Spirit
of Fluxus, Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, 1993, p. 150.
46 Andreas Huyssen, ‘Back to the Future’, p. 150.
47 Andreas Huyssen, ‘Back to the Future’, p. to t.
Fig. 2.3 Desmond Paul
Henry, Image 003 v.2, 1961.
(Image courtesy of Elaine
O’Hanrahan on behalf of the
artist)
2 Digital Art and Cultural Commentary24
the Fluxus ‘intermedia work ultimately legitimised itself as a medium in its own
right (Fig. 2.3).’48
During the 1980s, the rise of personal computers changed perceptions of infor-
mation. Digitisation transforms data into numerical code, meaning, ‘the original
waveform is digitally encoded and the information in it represented by the presence
or absence of pulses of equal strength, making it less subject to degradation than a
conventional analogue signal.’49The digital computer was central to this shift, be-
coming ‘the first widely disseminated system that offers the user the opportunity to
create, distribute, receive, and consume audiovisual content with the same box.’50
Just as digital artists have engaged with Modern, Frankfurt School and 1960s
interventions in art and technology, they have reflected upon 1980s art and technol-
ogy movements. During the 1980s, artists began to experiment with domestic tech-
nologies: fax machines, cassettes, video players and televisions, invoking earlier
experiments in art and technology. In a similar way, contemporary digital artists
have incorporated everyday media into their art. Leon Cmielewski and Josephine
Starrs, for example, incorporated a 1980s ‘table-top’ arcade game interface for their
installation Floating Territories.This work is explored in Chapter Seven, in the
terms of changing practices in digital art.
The 1980s also gave rise to the literary genre of cyber-punk, which has continued
to influence the production of digital art. The OutlawTechnologists, the Eighties
Wave and the Neuromantics, for example, experimented with themes of futurism,
virtuality, and urban transcendence. William Gibson’s 1984 text Neuromancer,51,
for example, was one of the first to conceive of the cyber city. That interest in virtual
metropolises has influenced contemporary works of digital art, from Shoba’s post-
apocalyptic vision of New York in Blowing Zen to Marnix de Nijs’ futuristic city in
Run Motherfucker Run. Marnix de Nijs uses a treadmill in his installation to convey
an altered sense of speed in a global-digital world. His art replicates feelings of psy-
chological fragmentation elicited by globalisation’s space-time affects.
In the following decade, artists began to engage with globalisation and new
flows of time, speed and space. 1990s ‘net.artists’ experimented with new digital
technologies, using connective devices and interactive media to articulate and even
to simulate, globalisation’s spatial, temporal and kinetic flows. Ross Mawdsley,
®™ark,and The Yes Men created works that dragged users across contexts, times
and landscapes. Christian Moeller and Joachim Sauter’s digital installation Net-
worked Skin of 1994 also provided an early articulation of globalisation’s alteration
of space. The artists used the façade of a building to project their interactive digital
work. By enabling multiple users in different locations to interact with Networked
Skin, they positively engaged with global technologies (Fig. 2.4).
48 Andreas Huyssen, ‘Back to the Future’, p. to t.
49 Mark J. P. Wolf, Abstracting Reality: Art, Communication, and Cognition in the Digital Age,
Lanham, University Press of US, 2000, ‘Foreword’.
50 Peter Lunenfeld (Ed.), Introduction in The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, Cam-
bridge Mass., MIT Press, 1999, p. xix.
51 William Gibson, Neuromancer, New York, Ace Publications, 1984.
Situationist Art 25
However, critics like Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio express concern over the
saturation of images and buzz of information in a technological age. According to
their critiques, the hyper-intensification of space, time and speed negatively impacts
upon feelings of connection and reality. Under these conditions, there is little time
to contemplate or connect with others. A parallel might be drawn between the speed
of digital technology and globalisation’s rapid flows of finance, technology, people,
ideas and ideology, or the overriding sense that living in a global/digital age is
temporally and kinetically frenetic. The shift from an analogue to digital world has
required adaption in terms of how we affectively relate to our environment and each
other. To this end, Timothy Allen Jackson posits that digital art can create ‘a rupture
with our previous relationship to time and space as well as to previous conceptions
of the real and to larger metaphysical issues’.52
Situationist Art
Early digital artists reflected a spirit of Situationism as they experimented with the
new media and applications made available in the early 1990s. As a form of digital
art, ‘net.art’ provided radical critiques of traditional art practice and cultural phe-
nomena, such as globalisation. Digital artists such as This is Not Art, and Jodi.org,
engaged with earlier artistic strategies like parody and mimicry, while incorporating
the banal technical realities of digitisation into their works: computers crashing,
pop-up banners, frozen screens, glitches, and hacker sabotage. Groups like ®™ark
and The Yes Men on the other hand, used digital technology to construct ‘corporate’
52 Timothy Allen Jackson, ‘Towards a New Media Aesthetic’ in David Trend (Ed.), Reading Digi-
tal Culture, Oxford, Blackwell, 2001, p. 349.
Fig. 2.4 Christian Moeller
and Joachim Sauter, Net-
worked Skin, 1994. (http://
www.christian-moeller.com/
display.php?project_id=46)
2 Digital Art and Cultural Commentary26
web pages that parodied those of their opponents, namely global figures and institu-
tions.
Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, digital artists were engaging with
two contentious topics: consumption and technology. With the rising market econo-
mies of the Western world and the elaboration of a culture of consumption, artists
used forms of mass communication, such as advertising, to articulate their concerns.
Naomi Klein’s text No Logo emerged as a powerful critique of Western commodi-
tisation and the impact of the mass media. Texts such as Klein’s came to inform
artistic movements, alarmed by the West’s reign of influence over other cultures.
Art began to vocalise what Jameson terms, ‘the inner truth of that newly emergent
social order of late capitalism’.53
Digital artists like ®™ark re-situated corporate images and adopted Situationist
principles of irony, juxtaposition and altered meanings. Their art was designed to
challenge users’ expectations and senses of authenticity and ‘truth’. In creating an
anti-realist aesthetic, these digital artists often integrated or parodied other works
without acknowledgement, blurring the line between original and mass-produced
art. Digital art from this period often conversed with controversial social, politi-
cal and economic issues. In conjuring responses of anger, shock or disbelief from
their audiences, these artists confirmed Jameson notion that ‘there is very little in
either the form or the content of contemporary art that contemporary society finds
intolerable and scandalous.’54 Jameson’s claim might be used to describe the current
digital economy, where only the unexpected, obscene or grandiose gestures succeed
in attracting our attention.
The artistic interventions of ®™ark, explored in the following chapter, might
easily be confused with the political gestures of governments and multi-national
corporations. Digital artworks like these are also often ‘accidentally’ discovered on
the Internet, which can make contexts for interpreting or locating them less evident
than if they were situated in formal gallery spaces. Yet, even if their contexts are
unclear, it still does not justify their severance from the realm of art, nor universalise
the claim that digitisation produces ‘a climate where the viewer cannot distinguish
between the expressive and the canned effect’.55 Like any new intervention in art,
digital art simply calls for new languages of articulation.
53 Fredric Jameson, ‘PostModernism and Consumer Society’, p. 114.
54 Fredric Jameson ‘PostModernism and Consumer Society’, p. 124.
55 Scott Weiland, ‘Sense, Memory and Media’, <http://www.digitalartsource.com/content/featur/
feat17/feat17p1.html>, Digital Art Source, (accessed 14 May 2004). This link is no longer active.
Art and Attention Economies 27
Art and Attention Economies
While attention economies can produce innovation through the construction of larg-
er-than-life works, Amy Scholder and Jordan Candall propose that ‘it is not neces-
sarily a very equal world. There remains only so much attention to go round.’56 This
sentiment is echoed by Critical Art Ensemble’s contention that ‘[i]f the project does
not possess monumental scale or volume, it’s considered just the work of a com-
mon user.’57In their own practice, digital artists Critical Art Ensemble recognise the
levels of global visibility that ‘larger-than-life’ campaigns—simultaneously staged
in virtual and physical arenas—can attain. Their art strongly contests the traditional
severance of art and politics, and assumptions of formal display.
Many early digital works presented high impact, yet didactic articulations. In
Ross Mawdsley’s Journey into Darkness, for example, the artist offers a rather sim-
plistic account of globalisation. The slow, fatalistic crawl of a fly across a corporate
logo emblazoned razor blade in the work, seems to overstate the death of individu-
ality under globalisation. These links re-emerge in the artwork ‘Revolt’, where the
presence of expressionless Lego™-style figures signals the absence of freedom and
originality. The most concerning imagery however, concerns his presentation of
disembodied black torsos, which show a kind of crude empathy for the ‘other’.
Mawdsley’s focus upon grandiose Flash™ aesthetics and the digital ‘medium’ ar-
guably compromises the depth of his message. Many of these early net.art works
experimented with new forms and media, often at the expense of a critical message.
The tension between form and meaning will be discussed in the following chapter:
‘Digital Art and Political Revolt’.
The need for artists to compete with the ‘attention economy’ can also lead to
the commercialisation of art. Julian Stallabrass contends that current digital art in-
stitutions like ZKM still ‘set their agenda according to the pulse of Siemens and
Deutsche Telekom; that is to say, they have to modify their levels of social criti-
cism or “forget their deutschmarks.”’58 The ties between art and commerce argu-
ably become stronger, when galleries and art institutions are forced to find private
revenue in the face of government funding cuts. In the Australian context, 2008
Queensland Arts Minister Rod Welford has announced that ‘the arts-as-business
model [is] replacing the arts-as-welfare model’,59 and that the sector needs ‘to fight
aggressively to maintain funding.’60 Galleries and art institutions have had to em-
56 Jordan Crandall and Amy Scholder (Eds), Interaction: Artistic Practice in the Network, Distrib-
uted Art Publishers Inc, New York, 2001, pp. 71–72.
57 Jordan Crandall and Amy Scholder (Eds), Interaction, p. 77.
58 Julian Stallabrass, Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce, London, Tate Pub-
lishing, 2003, p. 117.
59 Rosemary Sorensen, ‘Ain’t no sunshine when the grants are gone’, The Australian, <http://
www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,22875256-16947,00.html>, 2007, (accessed 6 December
2007). This link is no longer active.
60 Rosemary Sorensen, ‘Ain’t no sunshine when the grants are gone’, <http://www.theaustralian.
news.com.au/story/0,,22875256-16947,00.html>.
2 Digital Art and Cultural Commentary28
brace what Rosemary Sorensen terms a ‘shift in philosophical approach and that
they had to change to compete. It was inevitable that, in terms of ranking, some
were going to miss out.’61
Digital art can also be viewed by collecting institutions as less economically
lucrative than traditional art, in terms of sponsorship, recognition, and visitation.
Questions about archiving, classification and the location of digital works may have
contributed to this issue. Some attempts by galleries to acquire digital works have
also been met with criticism, from those who view such efforts as tokenistic. The
purchase of digital works has sometimes been construed as no more than what Ju-
lian Stallabrass terms ‘a relatively cost-effective way to appear contemporary, and
especially to be seen to address issues of globalisation.’62 These tensions, however,
can add to the richness and critical complexity of the forms produced in a similar
way to earlier styles.
Open Art
Some observers point to the open and democratic nature of digital formats, which
is seen to oppose the strict constraints of the established art world. However, like
all creative practices, digital art is also shaped by politics of elitism and exclusiv-
ity. Much of the language of new media criticism can be unnecessarily obscure. At
forums and colloquia, many of the same names dominate. Equally, the production
and experience of it is limited to those that have the necessary digital infrastructure
and fluency. As Stallabrass notes, ‘[t]he character of online elitism is of a different
kind from that found in the art world, which is embedded in location, architectural
display and ownership of rare objects.’63
The Internet offers unprecedented levels of creative exchange. As globalisation’s
most powerful ‘technoscape’, the Internet enables new opportunities for collabora-
tion. It also enables artists and audiences to overcome the previous constraints of
physical distance, which effected the transportation, construction and display of art.
The Internet offers new kinds of viewing spaces. It can enable artists to reach a far
wider range of audiences, and increase the awareness of their works. It also give
exposure not just to exhibitions taking place at well-known galleries, but at small
and otherwise overlooked spaces.
Some argue that online exhibitions threaten the survival of physical galleries,
or offer limited kinds of affective experiences, Countering this critique, Douglas
Davis notes how with the rise television and video, there was the similar fear that
‘a new, apparently dematerialized museum—i.e., the Web—will somehow drive us
61 Rosemary Sorensen, ‘Ain’t no sunshine when the grants are gone’, <http://www.theaustralian.
news.com.au/story/0,,22875256-16947,00.html>.
62 Julian Stallabrass, Internet Art, p. 118.
63 Julian Stallabrass, Internet Art, p. 136.
Open Art 29
all indoors, away from public spaces like theaters, movie houses or museums.’64
Davis notes, however, how the opposite in fact occurred, with ‘access leading to
a hunger not only for more but for going out in search of different forms of art
creation.’65Digital art has the capacity to become a more accessible and ‘familiar’
format, than traditional art forms such as sculpture or painting. It can be made and
experienced via such banal digital devices as the mobile phone, laptop or tablet.
While digitisation enables eclectic media forms to be borrowed, juxtaposed and
overlaid, digital art borrows from a medley of historical and theoretical traditions.
The recombinatory nature of digital art can also allow it to transcend the tradi-
tional boundaries of genre, artistry and production. The use of open source content,
connective media and banal devices to make and share digital art, might however,
render it a more collaborative and participatory form of expression. As exemplified
by many of the works explored in this book—such as iCinema’s T_Visionarium II
and Blast Theory’s Can You See Me Now?—many people are often involved in the
creation of digital works. One artwork can involve several collaborators, ranging
from film makers to graphic designers, academics, programmers, sound designers
and audiences. In crowd sourced and collaborative works, traditional principles of
originality, artistry and authorship are challenged.
Many digital works feature misappropriated content, which is ironically remedi-
ated to offer a form of cultural commentary. This evident in ®™ark’s interventions
discussed in Chapter Four and Brian Alfred’s film Overload, discussed in Chap-
ter Six. Jodi.org have actively embraced a spirit of anti-ownership, by enabling their
art to be altered, downloaded or distribution by users. Digital art collectives such as
®™ark,Jodi and Critical Art Ensemble disrupt traditional notions of originality and
authorship, in making it difficult to ascertain who the artist is, and who owns the
intellectual property. The artist Barbara Kruger incorporates advertising emblems
in her works, often without reference. Her actions reflect a spirit of anti-authorship,
which is reminiscent of Situationist techniques. iCinema’s artwork T_Visionarium
II, explored in Chapter Five, also converses with questions surrounding Digital
Rights Management (DRM). As iCinema suggest, the issue is not just about copy-
right protection, it is whether its enforcement opposes the sense of the Internet as
open, collaborative and essentially, democratic.
Following on from 1970s and 1980s electronic art—which experimented with
technologies such as television, camcorders, stereos, computer games and video
players—from the 1990s through to the new millennium, artists began experiment-
ing with portable media players, personal digital assistants, smart phones, laptops,
global positioning systems and wireless technologies. In doing so, they explored
new forms of artistry and modes of production, begging the question of what art
might have become in the digital age? If digital technology was altering art produc-
tion, then it was also transforming the ways in which it could be shared, produced
and understood. In the 2000s, the the ubiquity of digital technologies with enhanced
64 Douglas Davis, ‘The Museum of the Third Kind’, Art in US, Vol. 93, Issue 6, New York, 2005,
p. 75.
65 Douglas Davis, ‘The Museum of the Third Kind’, p. 75.
2 Digital Art and Cultural Commentary30
production capabilities, means that more and more people are using smart devices
to make and share content online. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin observe
how
[f]or the first time in history users have greater accessibility to such technological processes
as film editing, web-page creation, mp3 sampling, and online communication; all of which
have been facilitated through digital infrastructures.66
Just as the popularisation of production might challenge traditional notions of the
‘artist’, digital duplication, appropriation, crowd sourcing and collaboration have
the potential to rebuke ideals of aura, authenticity and originality. Digital art can
disrupt the traditional demarcation and ‘distance’ between the artist and spectator.
Yet, rather than alienating audiences, Darren Tofts notes how this reconfiguration
of the relationship can actually attract and empower audiences, through offering
more accessible (and less intimidating) spaces to experience it.67 The interchanges
between production and experience are exciting elements of digital art.
Interactivity and Criticism
While immersive principles are present in earlier forms, interactive digital art can
enables users to transcend the limits of space, time and speed. While heightened
levels of interactivity and responsiveness can differentiate digital art from earlier
expressions, Stallabrass notes how ‘[t]he spectrum of interaction on offer shades
from the minimal choice involved in clicking through a set sequence of pages to
permitting users to create the work themselves’.68 Janet Murray argues that ‘[l]
inear media such as books and films can portray space, either by verbal descrip-
tion or image, but only digital environments can present space that we can move
through.’69 In extending this idea, Dennis Del Favero notes in relation to iCinema’s
T_Visionarium II how ‘persons present become protagonists in a set of ever evolv-
ing interactive narratives. Central to all these innovations is the reformulation of
narrative itself.’70 Unlike traditional cinematic works, the images that unfold are
generated at random, without a linear time horizon. The art evolves in response
to the user’s movements and directions. Under these conditions, digital narrative
becomes navigable. To this end, principles of interaction, immersion and participa-
66 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, ‘Immediacy, Hypermediacy and Remediation’, Remedia-
tion: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2000, p. 31.
67 Julian Stallabrass, Internet Art, p. 61.
68 Julian Stallabrass, Internet Art, p. 61.
69 Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Cambridge
Mass., MIT Press, 1997, p. 79.
70 Dennis Del Favero, ‘Digitally Expanded Forms of Cinematic Narration’, in Dennis Del Favero
and Jeffery Shaw (Eds.), (dis)Locations, Karlshruhe, ZKM, Centre for Art and Media/Centre for
Interactive Cinema Research, Sydney, University of New South Wales, 2001.
Interactivity and Criticism 31
tion can make interfaces seem natural and inviting.T_Visionarium II is explored in
detail in Chapter Five.
The most effective works from the 1990s showed high levels of nuance in their
uses of digital technology to generate interactivity and negotiate the binaries of me-
dia and message. Jodi.org for example, actively conversed with operational issues,
incorporating technical glitches, frozen screens, quitting applications and pop-up
spam into their art. They ironically engaged with these technological realities, and
in doing forged an iterative relationship between content and form. However, some
theorists like Alexei Shulgin argue that interactivity is often manipulative, for it
is ‘always the author with his name and his careers behind it, and he just seduces
people to click buttons in his own name’.71 As discussed in Chapter Four, some
examples of early net.art were heavily directed. However, more recent expressions
give the user greater scope to influence the narrative direction of works, often in
real time. These developments suggest new approaches to digital art, with the emer-
gence of works that are self-reflexive and confirm Thomas McEvilley’s sense that
‘a hybrid object attempts to incorporate into itself its own counterweight or cri-
tique—its other.’72
In Chapter Seven, artworks that traverse the boundaries between artist/spectator
are explored. It creates a distinction between works that simply ‘use’ digital tech-
nology as a means, and those that use it to generate particular messages. In order to
create these kinds of ‘interfaceless’ experiences, Bolter and Grusin argue that the
interface needs to ‘be one that erases itself, so that the user is no longer aware of
confronting a medium, but instead stands in an immediate relationship to the con-
tents of that medium.’73 This idea might actualise Richard Wagner’s concept of the
‘total art-work’74—where the artist comes to ‘dominate, even overwhelm, flooding
the spectator/hearer with sensory impressions of different kinds. It is not meant as
information but as experience.’75
While a user must have some basic digital skills to negotiate pop-up boxes, nav-
igate their way through hyperlinks and manipulate the interface, as digital artist
Hisham Bizri states, it is not necessary for the user to be aware of every intended
effect. Digital art, he argues should be the product of subtle iterations
between the artist, the viewer, society, history, and art itself. In other words, it functions in
human experience making everything relevant: its form, the artist’s intention, the social and
historical ideal of the times, the scientific spirit of the age, all these are part and parcel.76
71 Julian Stallabrass, Internet Art, p. 61.
72 Thomas McEvilley, Art and Discontent: Theory at the Millennium, Documentext, New York,
McPherson and Company, 1991, p. 76.
73 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation, p. 23.
74 Adrian Henri, Total Art: Environments, Happenings, and Performance, New York, Praeger,
p. 10.
75 Adrian Henri, Total Art, p. 10.
76 Hisham M. Bizri, Hisham M. Bizri, <http://www.hishambizri.com/artistic.html>, 2004, (ac-
cessed 07 December 2004).
2 Digital Art and Cultural Commentary32
According to Bizri, individual experience is just as important as the artistic intent,
when it comes to art meaning. A user does not require the same technical or aes-
thetic understandings as the artist, to have a meaningful encounter with their art.
Affective Art
Digital art has the capacity to engage the user at an affective and bodily level, and
offer readings of globalisation centred upon the particularities of human encounter.
Heightened levels of interactivity, responsiveness, and immersion are key elements
that separate digital from conventional art forms. While these qualities alter the
physical experience of works, they also have symbolic implications for the under-
standing of what art may be. As Hansen contends,
if the hypostatization of the formal act of framing reality vacates the artwork of its Roman-
tic trappings (specifically the autonomy and its objective status as the bearer of truth of the
idea), and if the shock-effect relocates the impact of the work squarely in the domain of
experience, this is all in the service of redemption of embodied experience.77
Digital art’s focus on particular encounters, rather than universal aesthetics, argu-
ably leads to ‘a renewed investment of the body as a kind of converter of the general
form of framing into a rich, singular experience.’78 It is this language, which might
be used to inform understandings of globalisation.
Key works of digital art offer affective expression of globalisation. As Merleau-
Ponty elucidated, in a discussion of phenomenology and affect, ‘the perception of
a work, more than its author or history, was primary because it engaged viewers
and readers in their own response to meaning.’79 His argument was that ‘nothing
can become intelligible unless seen against a background, a horizon, a surrounding
field, a periphery.’80 Merleau-Ponty’s principle of ‘figure and ground’ invokes a
sense of context forged in response to the subject and their world. This approach to
globalisation would contend that our understandings of it are directly influenced by
our particular backgrounds and experiences.
Digital art’s technical and ontological qualities such as: immersion, interactiv-
ity, and critical responsiveness, render it a unique medium for the articulation of
globalisation. It is borne of its oeuvre, and in spatial and temporal terms can simu-
latethe phenomenon’s affects, from senses of space as fragmented, connected, or
dispersed; perceptions of time as continuous, disjunctive or irrelevant; feelings of
space as compacted, dispersed, or expansive; and experiences of speed as rapid,
liberating, and excessive. Digital art’s spatial, temporal and kinetic movements gen-
77 Mark B.N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, p. 3.
78 Mark B.N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, p. 3.
79 Laurie Schneider Adams, The Methodologies of Art, p. 142.
80 James Elkins, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1998, p. 87.
Affective Art 33
erate eclectic responses, and emulate the construction of globalisation as a nexus of
shifting flows.
While critics like Jean Baudrillard vocalise a fear, expressed by Tim Lenoir, that
technological developments associated with computer technology, artificial intelligence,
robotics, and more recently nanotechnology will succeed in displacing humanity through
an evolutionary process leading first to a cyborg/human assemblage and ultimately to the
extinction and replacement of the human altogether81
To the contrary, digital art can be highly connective. Interactive interfaces encour-
age human interaction, touch, reflection and bodily response. In spatial, temporal
and kinetic terms, digital art can critically engage with affect. Digital artworks can
invite users into their space: shifting time sequences, directing narratives and influ-
encing kinetic flows. Further, responsive and interactive works of digital art contest
the formal severance of artist and audience. They oppose the ambitions, as Pierre
Borudieu observes, of the
producer who aims to be autonomous, that is, entirely the master of his product, who tends
to reject not only the ‘programmes’ imposed a priori by scholars and scribes, but also—fol-
lowing the old hierarchy of doing and saying—the interpretations superimposed a poste-
riori on his work.82
Qualities of immersion, interaction, and real-time response directly engage with the
individual, transforming the corporeally-detached art spectator into a physically-
involved user. Digital art’s technical and discursive tools are uniquely equipped
to both articulate and simulate, globalisation’s bodily and perceptual impacts: in-
terchanges of memory; the flux of reverie; the cognition of global space; reactions
to digital speed; conceptualisations of the past; responses to the present; and the
imagination of the future. Perhaps most critically, digital art can facilitate the con-
textualisation of self in relation to these torrents. As an interactive and generative
medium that directly engages with individual bodies, digital art can promote a new
affective consciousness of globalisation.
In his text, Hansen connects ‘the aesthetics of new media with a strong theory of
embodiment.’83 In reflecting upon contemporary works of digital art, he critiques
Gilles Deleuze’s reading of the affect and the image, by re-introducing Bergson’s
theory of embodiment.84 In his Foreword to New Philosophy for New Media, Tim
Lenoir posits that
81 Tim Lenoir, ‘Foreword’, in Mark B.N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, Cambridge
Mass., MIT Press, 2004, p. xiv.
82 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, (Trans. R. Nice),
Cambridge Mass., Harvard, University Press, 1984, p. 4.
83 Mark B.N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, p. 3.
84 For Deleuze’s discussions on affect and the image, see: Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Move-
ment Image, (Trans. B. Habberjam and H. Tomlinson), London, Athlone Press, 1986 and Gilles
Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, (Trans. R. Galeta and H. Tomlinson), London, Athlone Press,
1989.
2 Digital Art and Cultural Commentary34
[r]ather than erasing an active role of the sentient body in the production of media effects as
Friedrich Kittler’s interpretation of digital media would have it, Hansen argues that media
convergence under digitality actually increases the centrality of the body as framer.85
Meaning, that when art is virtualised the user becomes the processor or ‘framer’ of
information.86
As an experiential construct centred upon touch, bodily involvement, interpre-
tation and perceptual response, digital art challenges senses of self in relation to
space, time and surrounding phenomena. The Bergsonian concept of the body as a
‘center of indetermination’, acting as a filter creatively selecting facets of images
from the universal flux according to its ‘own capacities’87 provides new ways of
thinking about globalisation as the sum of its subjective affects. In this construc-
tion, the individual becomes ‘a source of action on the world of images, subtracting
among external influences those that are relevant to its own interests. Bergson calls
such isolated image components “perceptions”’.88
Throughout this book, digital art works are presented as the ‘subtracted images’
of artists and users. As Darren Tofts writes, ‘indeterminacy is the nature of distrib-
uted aesthetics’89 meaning, ‘not everyone will experience the same thing’.90 In mak-
ing this claim, he contends that the interpretation of digital art is contingent upon
different backgrounds and perspectives.This idea will be explored with reference to
different works, ranging from ®™ark’s corporate campaigns to iCinema’s digital
installations and Joanna Berzowska’s haptic clothing.
Conclusion
Many of the most original examples of digital art remediate the traditional art binary
of form and content, or the media versus the message. While digital technology
may be historically unique, much of the content of digital art resonates with earlier
dialogues and forms, ranging from Modern cinema to Frankfurt School criticism,
Situationist art, 1980s electronic movements and 1990s net.art. The word ‘art’ in the
term ‘digital art’ is important: it debunks the complete novelty of ‘new media art’,
and the rejection of ‘new media’ from the field of artistic endeavour.
In a review of Dan Harries’ The New Media Book, Richard Edwards suggests
strong grounds for an historical approach to digital art, particularly if one maintains
‘[m]ost new media have been developed in dialogue with existing “old” and estab-
85 Tim Lenoir, ‘Foreword’, p. xxii.
86 Tim Lenoir, ‘Foreword’, p. xxii.
87 Tim Lenoir, ‘Foreword’, p. xx.
88 Tim Lenoir, ‘Foreword’, p. xx.
89 Darren Tofts, ‘Forward and Beyond: Anticipating Distributed Aesthetics’, Fibreculture, <http://
www.journal.fibreculture.org/issue7/issue_7tofts.html>, 2005, (accessed 23 March 2007). This
link is no longer active.
90 Darren Tofts, ‘Forward and Beyond’, <http://www.journal.fibreculture.org/issue7/issue_7tofts.
html>.
Conclusion 35
lished media formations such as cinema and television.’91 Edwards reflects upon the
use of “historical context and previous models of technological change to blunt any
facile notion of “newness”.92 Similarly, Manuel De Landa posits that digital works
‘should be thought of as one more element added to a complex mix, fully coexist-
ing with older components (energetic and material), not all of which have been left
in the past.’93 Arguably, the term ‘digital art’ is the most useful term for it locates
digital works as ‘art’, and places them on a critical and historical continuum.
This chapter has argued for a flexible language in the articulation of digital art.
In doing so, it seeks to counter rigid frameworks that often produce two equally
problematic positions. As Mark Hansen elaborates,
[for] almost every claim advanced in support of the “newness” of new media, it seems that
an exception can readily be found, some earlier cultural or artistic practice that already
displays the specific characteristic under issue. This situation has tended to polarize the dis-
course on new media art between two (in my opinion) equally problematic positions: those
who feel that new media have changed everything and those who remain sceptical that there
is anything at all about new media that is, in the end, truly new.94
Manuel De Landa’s claim that ‘[t]he digital revolution should be thought of as one
more element added to a complex mix, fully coexisting with older components (en-
ergetic and material), not all of which have been left in the past’95 In challenging
traditional approaches to art and artistry, this chapter has suggested that digital art
can provide means of expressing inaccessible phenomena. To this end, this chapter
informs the following discussions on globalisation and crises of articulation.
91 Richard L. Richards, ‘Review of Dan Harries (Ed.), The New Media Book’, http://muse.jhu.
edu/journals/the_moving_image/v004/4.1edwards.html,2004, (accessed 28 April 2006)
92 Richard L. Richards, ‘Review of Dan Harries’, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/the_moving_image/
v004/4.1edwards.html
93 Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, New York, Swerve Editions, 1997,
p. 98.
94 Mark B.N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, p. 21.
95 Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, p. 98.
37
Chapter 3
Globalisation and Digital Art
M. Langdon, The Work of Art in a Digital Age: Art, Technology and Globalisation,
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4939-1270-4_3, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Introduction
This chapter establishes grounds for viewing globalisation through the lenses of
digital art. It engages with theories of Formalism, Structuralism and Semiotics, and
posits that while these frameworks may be useful in providing broad conceptualisa-
tions, the affective realms of human experience and encounter require discursive
flexibility. Ethnographic, deconstructive and affective dialogues are also introduced
(Fig. 3.1).
This chapter shows how open and dynamic approaches make room for the it-
erations and contradictions of human response. To this end, it advances particular
rather than universal approaches to globalisation and art, as human phenomena.
This chapter contends that digital art can offer affective articulations of globalisa-
tion, centred upon individual experience, bodily encounter and perceptive response.
Through centralising human subjects, digital art can provide new ways of under-
standing external phenomena.
Structuralist Approaches
Popular constructions of globalisation tend to be focused upon large-scale political
economic effects, underscored by the idea expressed by Walden Bello, that ‘unend-
ing growth is the centerpiece of globalization, the mainspring of its legitimacy’.1
Yet, this approach often overlooks other dynamics, such as the movements of peo-
ple, media, technology and ideology. There are also strong grounds for using flex-
ible discourses in the approach of art. In order to appreciate the need for affective
1 Walden Bello, ‘Globalization in Retreat’, Foreign Policy in Focus, <http://www.fpif.org/
fpiftxt/3826>, 2006, (accessed 11 December 2007). Link is no longer active.
38 3 Globalisation and Digital Art
approaches to art and globalisation, we must first understand the methods that they
counter.
In commenting upon the Structuralist discourses of Lévi-Strauss, Edith Kurzweil
claimed that Tristes Tropiques (1955) foregrounded his seminal work Structural
Anthropology (1958), which was underscored by what she termed
the systemic attempt to uncover deep universal mental structures as these manifest them-
selves in kinship and larger social structures, in literature, philosophy and mathematics, and
in the unconscious psychological patterns that motivate human behaviour.2
Kurzweil reveals an approach premised upon systemic similarities rather than par-
ticular differences. As Lance Taylor observes, Structuralist discourses often rely
upon the deduction ‘of macro behavioural functions’.3 Through building upon
2 Edith Kurzweil, The Age of Structuralism, New York, Columbia University Press, 1980, p. 1.
3 Lance Taylor (Ed.), Socially Relevant Policy Analysis: Structuralist Computable General Equi-
librium Models for the Developing World, Cambridge Mass., The MIT Press, 1990, p. 4.
Fig. 3.1 Wolfgang Ammer, Globalization 2, 2002. (Michigan State University, https://www.msu.
edu/user/hillrr/Louisville%20talk_files/image002.jpg)
39Structuralist Approaches
methods derived from psychology and the social sciences, Structuralist analyses
tend to minimise the role of the individual, in the search for universal meanings.
Semiotic discourses reflect key tenets of Structuralism, in focussing upon struc-
tures, signifiers and signs. As Laurie Schneider Adams expresses, Semiotics as-
sumes ‘that cultures and cultural expressions such as language, art, music, and film
are composed of signs, and that each sign has a meaning beyond, and only beyond,
it’s literal self’.4 In creating links between production, consumption, ‘and the forms
and codes of representation in which they reproduce ideology’,5 T.J. Clark and Ray-
mond Williams sought to identify the social ‘signifiers’ that made creative works
understandable as art. Influenced by Structuralist and Semiotic theories, Formalist
art approaches are underscored by the notion that art has an essential ‘truth’ or
aura, which in Laurie Schneider Adams’ terms, can ‘be understood independently of
context’.6 Clement Greenberg was a leading proponent of Formalism. In privileging
form over content, his criticism was shaped by the writings of Immanuel Kant and
Roger Fry.
Yet, the reduction of phenomena to signs, systems or values is problematic, for
it universalises and reduces human experience. Umberto Eco, however, offers a
more flexible take on Structuralist discourses. He views art and cultural phenom-
ena are ‘simultaneously semiotic and non-semiotic, at once prone and immune to
systematic linguistic and structural descriptions’.7 In stating that ‘[n]o graphic mark
is merely a sign, but none is a “technical”, “meaningless” gesture made only in
the service of some higher significance’,8 he claims that while Structuralist dis-
courses can provide context, they should be flexibly applied. As Mark Gottdiener
elaborates, ‘there is always a contextual basis to “Truth” claims’,9 or in other words,
‘all utterances and actions have contexts and consequences’.10 While both writers
advance systemic approaches, they also make room for individual contexts and in-
terpretations.
James Elkins similarly claims that ‘[w]henever the description of a picture could
do without the picture, I am suspicious’.11 Art theorist Janet Wolff also problema-
tises schematic approaches to art and cultural phenomena. She claims that they tend
to emerge from mainstream Western doctrines, which often fail to be ‘disturbed by
the sociological critique of aesthetics itself as a historically specific development,
and of all aesthetic judgements as class-based, gender-linked and in general ideo-
4 Laurie Schneider Adams, The Methodologies of Art, p. 133.
5 Janet Wolff, Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art, 2nd Ed., Michigan, University of Michigan
Press, 1999, p. 22.
6 Laurie Schneider Adams, The Methodologies of Art, p. 32.
7 James Elkins, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them, p. 78.
8 James Elkins, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them, p. 78.
9 Mark Gottdiener, Postmodern Semiotics: Material Culture and the Forms of Postmodern Life,
Oxford, Blackwell, 1995, p. 23.
10 Mark Gottdiener, Postmodern Semiotics, p. 23.
11 James Elkins, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them, p. xviii.
40 3 Globalisation and Digital Art
logically produced.’12 Structuralist accounts offer reductive understandings of art
and globalisation. Structuralist and formalist theories are arguably more apposite
to the identification of fixed formulas and principles, than the understanding of
globalisation and art. The value of these approaches may be in their simplification
of complex constructs into identifiable structures or systems. Yet, the application
of universalism to human experience can have dangerous outcomes, such as the
invalidation of divergent encounters.
The Universal and the Particular
There is a tendency for globalisation and art to be described in universal and in-
tangible ways. Political economic analyses of globalisation, for example, are often
preoccupied with the need to schematise its impacts, or agree on a definition. As
published on the World Bank website, one policy group lamented that ‘[a]mazingly
for so widely used a term, there does not appear to be any Indeed, the breadth of
meanings attached to it seems to be increasing rather than narrowing over time’.13
Alarmist accounts of globalisation can also be reductive, in focussing upon
binary senses of restriction versus freedom, as the title of Naomi Klein’s text
Fences and Windows expresses.14 In this particualr text, Klein posits that ‘[m]
ass privatization and deregulation have bred armies of locked-out people, whose
services are no longer needed, whose lifestyles are written off as “backward”,
whose basic needs go unmet’.15 While this may be true for some, the implication
that these impacts are universal is problematic. Is everyone left feeling ‘locked
out’ and ‘powerless’? Responses to globalisation cannot be categorised in simple
positive or negative terms. Human experiences of the phenomenon can fluctuate
in contradictory ways.
Inda and Rosaldo write that Cultural Imperialist approaches present globalisation
‘primarily as a process of cultural imposition and dominance—of the imposition
and dominance of Western (predominantly American) culture over the remainder
of the globe’.16 This understanding is underscored by the idea advanced by Klein,
that globalisation is leading to the standardisation of culture. Yet, this construction
of globalisation limits the raneg of possible experiences and responses. In focusing
12 Janet Wolff, Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art, p. 27.
13 PREM Economic Policy Group and Development Economics Group, ‘What is Globalization’,
The World Bank, <http://www1.worldbank.org/economicpolicy/globalization/ag01.html>, 2000,
(accessed 1 October 2007). This link is no longer active.
14 Naomi Klein, Fences and Windows: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the Globalization De-
bate, New Delhi, Leftword, 2002.
15 Naomi Klein, ‘No Logo’, No Logo Website, <http://www.nologo.org/>, n. d., (accessed 23 Oc-
tober 2006). This link is no longer active.
16 Jonathon Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, (Eds.), The Anthropology of Globalization, p. 13.
41Deconstructive Discourses
upon either-or impacts, alarmist accounts negate the subtle inter-changes and con-
tradictions of human response.
As explored in Chap. 7, artists like Justine Cooper show how globalisation can
generate contrary experiences. Her installation Transformers presents human, in-
formation and technological flows as simultaneously positive and negative. Cooper
engages with our ability to experience positive impacts in one context, and negative
affects in another thereby challenging the implication that all members of develop-
ing countries are ‘fenced in’, while those living in Western countries are afforded
‘windows’ of freedom. In creating a parallel conversations on globalisation, digiti-
sation and art, this text suggest that systemic and binary approaches to phenomena
limit the possibilities of experience.
Deconstructive Discourses
Deconstructive approaches can provide greater flexibility in the exploration of glo-
balisation and digital art. Roland Barthes is often identified as instigating a criti-
cal shift between Structuralist and Post-Structuralist thought. Barthes went from a
theory that debunked ‘the old humanist superstition that artistic creation cannot be
“reduced” to a system’,17 to one where systemic approaches were discouraged. He
rejected the deification of the artist, and the ‘untouchability’ of Academy approved
fine arts, as advanced by the Formalism. Through a focus upon particularisation
over universalisation, Barthes’ new approach was a return to Humanism.18
Through its close associations with the theorists Martin Heidegger, and Jacques
Derrida, Deconstruction developed as a challenge to Structuralism and Semiotics
and the premise of objectively identifiable systems and signs.19 Contrary to Struc-
turalist methods, deconstructive approaches show how tensions between art and its
contexts of production can actually be productive. To this end, deconstruction might
be seen as a philosophy of consciousness, through the location of created objects in
terms of cultural phenomena and encounters with them.
In contesting the notion of ‘totalising reason’, deconstructive discourses oppose
singular accounts, in prompting what Jacques Derrida terms as ‘resistance to single
explanations, a respect for difference and a celebration of the regional, local and
particular’.20 While Structuralists may seek to identify the universal truths underlin-
ing cultural phenomena—such as globalisation and art—Post-structuralist theorists
seek to deconstruct them. In a critique of Semiotics, Derrida rebuffs Saussure’s
search for systems and signs, by arguing that meanings are not rigid or universal,
17 Laurie Schneider Adams, The Methodologies of Art, p. 154.
18 Laurie Schneider Adams, The Methodologies of Art, p. 154.
19 Laurie Schneider Adams, The Methodologies of Art, p. 17.
20 Jacques Derrida, ‘Deconstruction and the Other’, in R. Kearney, States of Mind: Dialogues with
Contemporary Thinkers, Washington, New York University Press, 1995, p. 157.
42 3 Globalisation and Digital Art
but ‘vary according to contexts, which themselves are continually in flux’.21 As a
philosophy of consciousness, Deconstruction opposes teleological accounts of his-
tory and culture.
Digital theorist Manuel De Landa also problematises Structuralist approaches to
cultural phenomena. He argues that from
the perspective of a bottom-up methodology, it is incorrect to characterise contemporary
societies as “disciplinary”, or as “capitalist”, or, for that matter, “patriarchal” (or any other
label that reduces a complex mixture of processes to a single factor), unless one can give the
details of a structure-generating process that results in a society wide system.22
In advancing ‘bottom-up’ analyses, De Landa makes room for the movements and
contradictions of individual experiences. Deconstructive approaches to globalisa-
tion and art, might show how our interpretations are influenced by particular, dy-
namic and localised experiences. These discourses can make room for the contra-
dictions of individual experiences, through challenging the fixity of and creating
new spaces in between.
Ethnographic Approaches
Globalisation is often popularly construed as a threat to the ‘groundedness’ of com-
munity: altering senses of cultural cohesion, collective history, shared purposes and
traditions. In times of cultural change and diaspora, efforts to preservation local
values and traditions are used as ways to address real and perceived dangers. As
Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson observe, sometimes ‘displaced peoples cluster
around remembered or imagined homelands, places, or communities in a world that
seems increasingly to deny such firm territorialised anchors in their actuality’.23 Yet,
claims founded upon uniform memories and experiences can be problematic, par-
ticularly when they are founded upon heritage myths, or a misguided remembrance
of how things were (Fig. 3.2).
Arjun Appadurai writes that a ‘central paradox of ethnic politics in today’s
world’, is that through processes of preservation, local ‘primordia (whether of lan-
guage or skin color or neighbourhood or kinship) are often globalised’.24 The ‘uni-
versalisation’ of local customs, invokes Jameson’s ironic ‘particularisation of the
universal and the universalisation of the particular’.25 As particularised senses of
kinship, homeland, belonging and continuity are challenged by universal social,
21 Laurie Schneider Adams, The Methodologies of Art, p. 162.
22 Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, p. 271.
23 Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson ‘Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity and the Politics of Differ-
ence’, in Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo (Eds.), The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader,
Malden, Blackwell Publishing, 2002, p. 69.
24 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in a Global Cultural Economy’, p. 57.
25 Fredric Jameson, and Masao Miyoshi (Eds.), The Cultures of Globalisation, p. xi.
43Ethnographic Approaches
political and economic processes, ‘generalised condition(s) of homelessness’26 can
ensue. These feelings may be impelled by actual events—the disbanding of nations,
the shifting of borders, threats to security, the diaspora of people—but can also
provoked by intangible, perceptual re-territorialisations, such as the sense that time
has ‘sped up’, the world is becoming closer, or cultural values and tastes are being
standardised. Yet, these affects can be difficult to pin-point, creating crises of ar-
ticulation. To be aware that the world is changing—but to not know how to express
it—only adds to mass senses of fear, alarm and powerlessness.
Underlining this apprehension may be the assumption that real impacts can be
grasped, located and resisted. This perception, which often underscores popular
protests to globalisation, is however problematic. Appadurai’s vision of the phe-
nomenon as a series of flows, challenges such rigid approaches. In resisting the
tendency to assume an isomorphism between place and culture,27 Xavier Inda and
Renato Rosaldo highlight the fallacy of backlashes centred upon the ‘groundedness’
of culture and tradition. Instead, they show how ethnographic approaches can pro-
vide understandings of how individuals are responding in culturally specific ways.28
Saskia Sassen’s paper ‘Globalisation and the Formation of Claims’29 also chal-
lenges singular accounts of globalisation. In demonstrating how the phenomenon
26 Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, ‘Beyond ‘Culture’ ’, p. 68.
27 Jonathon Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, (Eds.), The Anthropology of Globalization, p. 11.
28 Jonathon Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, (Eds.), The Anthropology of Globalization, p. 5.
29 Saskia Sassen, ‘Globalization and the Formation of Claims’, in Joan Copjec and Michael Sorkin
(Eds.) Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity, London, Verso, 1999.
Fig. 3.2 Justine Cooper, Transformers, 2002. (http://justinecooper.com/transformers.html)
44 3 Globalisation and Digital Art
generates more than one kind of affect, she employs an ethnographic approach to
show how it can facilitate forms of free expression. In line with Fredric Jameson’s
claim,30 Sassen suggests that as the nation state as ‘the former container of social
process and power’31 breaks down, ‘a new geography of politics linking subnational
spaces takes shape’.32 Globalisation, she suggests, can provides new opportunities
to explore and experiment with identity, free from the constraints of national bor-
ders. As Inda and Rosaldo contend, ‘the uprooting of culture is only half the story
of globalization. The other half is that the deterritorialization of culture is invariably
the occasion for the reinsertion of culture in new time-space contexts.33 The dimin-
ished influence of the nation state can enable new kinds of expression to emerge.
This may be particularly for those citizens that never culturally or politically iden-
tified with it, for example social minorities, immigrants, refugees and indigenous
people. In this way, Sassen’s ethnographic approach to globalisation makes room
for the micro articulations of those at various times termed ‘the other’.
Ethnographic approaches emphasise the richness and variability of particular
encounters and interpretations. These methods lend themselves to particularised
and affective analyses because as Inda and Rosaldo argue, they are ‘interested in
the individual imagination, in its perceptual negotiation with collective images and
as social connection’.34 Their discourse is primarily concerned with globalisation’s
contexts and conjunctures. To this end, they advance frameworks that emphasise
divergence, contingency and gradation. In re-centring discourses around cultures
and people, ethnographic methods can help us locate globalisation in terms of its
local impacts.
Global Flows
Several writers articulate globalisation in terms of its dynamic impacts or ‘flows’.
In his essay ‘Disjuncture and Difference in a Global Cultural Economy’,35 Arjun
Appadurai describes increased movements of people, finance, media, technology
and ideology around the world, using the terms ‘ethnoscapes’, ‘financescapes’,
‘mediascapes’, ‘technoscapes’ and ‘ideoscapes’.36 This fluid conceptualisation is
sympathetic toManuel De Landa’s notion of concomitant and organic processes. In
A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, De Landa writes that the ‘resulting emer-
30 Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Eds.), The Cultures of Globalization, p. xiii.
31 Saskia Sassen, ‘Globalization and the Formation of Claims’, p. 87.
32 Saskia Sassen, ‘Globalization and the Formation of Claims’, p. 87.
33 Jonathon Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo (Eds.), The Anthropology of Globalization, p. 11.
34 Jonathon Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo (Eds.), The Anthropology of Globalization, p. 10.
35 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in a Global Cultural Economy’, 2002.
36 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in a Global Cultural Economy’.
45Global Flows
gent structures simply add themselves to the mix of previously existing ones, inter-
acting with them, but never leaving them behind as a prior stage of development’.37
It is clear that globalisation is having significant human and cultural impacts,
altering the ways in which people relate to the world and each other. A rise in global
communication and travel has led to new flows of people and cultural values, or
what Appadurai terms ‘ethnoscapes’. As a key manifestation of globalisation, the
Internet has heightened the sharing of cultural information and ideas, enabling in-
dividuals to communicate and connect in greater ways than ever before. Images,
videos and stories posted by travellers on websites, blogs, forums and social media
sites, are providing new levels of visual access to diverse world locations, raising
cultural awareness and inspiring others to visit. The Internet enables trips to be eas-
ily booked online, facilitating unprecedented levels of global traffic.
Global conflicts are creating different kind of human exchanges. As evidenced
by the post-2001 ‘War on Terror’ and 2011 ‘Arab Spring’, the sharing of informa-
tion online is enabling allies, protestors and activists to forge global allegiances.
Global warfare is also leading to the uprooting of people, As nations are disband-
ed and homelands ravaged, people are becoming displaced and seeking refuge, in
numbers that have never been seen before. This flow of people can lead to the hy-
bridization of culture, where new values are welcomed or rejected, as race riots in
Europe, North America and Australia have shown.
As discussed in the previous section, viewing globalisation through a human or
ethnic lens can lead to new understandings, in privileging an approach that as Inda
and Rosaldo’s explain,
is preoccupied not just with mapping the shape taken by the particular flows of capital,
people, goods, images, and ideologies that crisscross the globe, but also with the experi-
ences of people living in specific localities when more and more of their everyday lives are
contingent on globally extensive processes.38
By focussing upon globalisation’s human and cultural flows, we can begin to trace
its impacts upon senses of identity, tradition, history, continuity, community and
culture. Ethnographic approaches counter the popular tendency to talk about glo-
balisation in terms of economic flows. The word ‘globalisation’ is often mistakenly
interchanged with ‘global capitalism’, ‘global markets’ or ‘Americanisation’, terms
that may only tell part of the story.
In his discussion of these large-scale impacts, Appadurai adapts Marx’s com-
modity principles of product and consumer fetishism.39 He reflects upon the role
that corporations and the mass media play in driving global patterns of consump-
tion. Appadurai also suggests that the deregulation of finance limits the ability of
states to impose sanctions upon corporations, which in turn leads to their global
influence. This corporatism is seen to lead to the standardisation of culture, and
patterns of consumption.
37 Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, p. 271.
38 Jonathon Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, (Eds.), The Anthropology of Globalization, p. 5.
39 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in a Global Cultural Economy’.
46 3 Globalisation and Digital Art
Appadurai examines globalisation’s financial flows through the prism of ideol-
ogy, or what he describes as Western Capitalism’s ‘ideoscapes’.40 In his exploration
of what he terms ‘mechanical art’41—a reference to the title of Walter Benjamin’s
seminal essay—Appadurai examines how ideology infiltrates through global adver-
tising and the mass media, and in turn impacts upon local cultures and tastes. Ulf
Hannerz’s text Modernism/Postmodernism also shows how globalisation facilitates
the advancement of Western ideologies. He claims that ‘[w]hen the center speaks,
the periphery listens, and on the whole does not talk back’.42 This one-sidedness, he
suggests, is a result of the West’s control and influence over media and communica-
tions. Hannerz connects globalisation to earlier Western Imperialist projects, such
as the colonisation of Africa, Algeria, India and Oceania.43
Post-colonial analyses of globalisation show how Western idioms are deeply en-
trenched within social, political and economic processes. Frantz Fanon contends
that Western ideologies are embedded in the very structures, institutions, images
and cultural expressions.44 This perspective is echoed in other dialogues, which
have emerged in response to what Peter Brooker terms the
blunt facts of economic, political and military power that have confirmed America and the
West’s controlling cultural influence—including the magnetism of its mythologies and the
control Western intellectuals exercise over communication systems and regimes of truth.45
These impacts are seen to produce a kind of rampant consumerism, which affects
the ways that we interact and think about the world.
In her No Logo,46 Naomi Klein claims that globalisation’s financial and ideologi-
cal flows contribute to the corporatism of life. In her 2001 text, Klein refers to the
banal infiltration of commercial value, taste and ideology. Klein’s analysis reflects
Baudrillard’s concern that where ‘old distinctions and orientations are abolished:
objects no longer relate at all to their processes of human production, there is a loss
of emotional content and of “objective” or critical distance’.47 By examining the
mass media’s imposition of idioms, she popularised the alarmist sense that globali-
sation was adversely affecting local cultures, identities and traditions.
Klein’s 2002 text Fences/Windows48 continues the dialogue established in No
Logo. Within the book, she places globalisation in continuation with processes of
40 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in a Global Cultural Economy’.
41 See: Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in a Global Cultural Economy’, p. 58 for
the re-arrangement of the title to Benjamin’s essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’.
42 Ulf Hannerz, ‘Notes on the Global Ecumene’, in Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo (Eds.), The
Anthropology of Globalisation: A Reader, Malden, Blackwell Publishing, 2002, p. 38.
43 Ulf Hannerz, ‘Notes on the Global Ecumene’.
44 For a discussion of contemporary forms of colonisation see: Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the
Earth, New York, Grove Press, 1968.
45 Peter Brooker, (Ed.), Modernism/Postmodernism, London, Longman, 1992, p. 24.
46 Naomi Klein, No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs, New York, Picador, 2002.
47 Peter Brooker, (Ed.), Modernism/Postmodernism, p. 22.
48 Naomi Klein, Fences and Windows, 2002.
47Global Flows
Capitalism and Western Imperialism. Her post-colonial account is sympathetic to
Jonathon Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo’s thesis that globalisation is a ‘continu-
ation of a long historical process Western ‘imperialist’ expansion—embracing the
colonial expansions of the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries’.49 By examining
globalisation in terms of earlier histories and impacts, Klein suggests that the values
of supply and demand continue to create unequal levels of advantage, entrenching
cultures of inequity and divide. Yet, while the connections between globalisation
and capitalism may be valid, Klein’s analysis arguably focuses too heavily upon
systemic effects, to the detriment of cultural and social responses.
Klein’s arguments reflect the perception that the global mass media has ‘sped
up’ the propagation of Western consumerism and ideology. Yet, her claims reveal
high levels of alarmism in the suggestion that globalisation’s affects are universally
detrimental. Klein’s analysis reduces globalisation to a series of binary impacts:
advantage and exploitation. By drawing upon alarmist approaches to globalisation,
she re-articulates a popular response to the phenomenon. Klein’s discourse con-
verses with Appadurai’s concern that globalisation’s idioms and economies might
create ‘distortions of a world of merchandising so subtle that the consumer is con-
sistently helped to believe that he or she is an actor, where in fact he or she is at best
a chooser’.50 Yet, in focussing upon globalisation’s negative impacts, this account
leaves little space for positive or mixed responses. Ironically, alarmist frameworks
reflect elements of the Imperialism that they oppose, in speaking on behalf of others
and making assumptions about their experiences.
A rise in digital technologies and global connectivity is also characteristic of the
global oeuvre. The transformation of data into numerical code has had a significant
impact upon the ways in which we communicate and disseminate information. On
the one hand, it has made data far more transferable, and information immediate
than with analogue formats. The mass infiltration of responsive and interactive me-
dia like MP3 players, mobile phones, flash drives, and personal devices, has also led
to an increased awareness of digital technology—shifting perceptions of the world,
and ourselves in relation to it. The growth of the Internet in particular, has facilitated
unparalleled levels of global information exchange.
The popularisation of complementary devices such as web-cams, voice over
Internet protocol (VoIP) and instant messaging, and their facilitation of websites
and mobile apps such as ‘Facebook’,51 ‘Skype’,52 and ‘YouTube’,53 has contributed
to conflicting senses of immediacy, involvement, nearness, distance and divide.
These may involve senses of space, speed, and time as regulated, constant, linear,
disjunctive, ephemeral and/or arbitrary. These different ideas influence many of
the artworks explored in this book. From the global production and realisation of
iCinema’s T_Visionarium II, to Ross Mawdsley’s presentation of global exploita-
49 Jonathon Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, (Eds.), The Anthropology of Globalization, p. 14.
50 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in a Global Cultural Economy’, p. 57.
51 Facebook, <http://www.facebook.com>, (accessed 6 July 2014).
52 Skype, <http://www.skype.com>, (accessed 6 July 2014).
53 YouTube, <http://www.youtube.com>, (accessed 6 July 2014).
48 3 Globalisation and Digital Art
tion and cultural division in his Simian series, digital artists are engaging with the
possibilities and limitations, of globalisation technologies.
One of the consequences of globalisation’s ‘technoscapes’, is the creation of
digital divides between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’; with levels of access, digital
literacy and bandwidth affecting user experiences. By way of example, interactive
digital artworks, require reasonable levels of technical knowledge and ability for
the navigation of hyperlinks, audio cues and graphical user interfaces (GUIs). The
seemingly simple act of ‘surfing the web’ requires technical language command,
computer education, computer software, hardware, and associated infrastructure.
Peter Brooker, for highlights the limitations of the technoscape, arguing that ‘[a]s
an historical condition, digital inequity is connected to the blunt facts of economic,
political and military power, that have confirmed the West’s cultural, political and
economic hegemony’.54
Levels of imbalance clearly shade digitisation’s ‘democratic’ ideals. While digi-
tal technology may liberate users from the restrictions of sequential time and Eu-
clidean space, problems of access, literacy and usability confirm that its affects are
experienced differently. Hansen writes that ‘[f]rom the very beginning of critical
engagement with computer technology, concern has been voiced about the poten-
tial, feared by many, celebrated by some, of the end of humanity.’55
Online surveillance and regulation also threaten senses of the Internet as an
open, democratic and inclusive space. Equally, closed networks such as intranets
and secure sites suggest that digital information does not always flow freely. While
innumerable sites offer universal access, there are perhaps just as many that require
membership and/or login information. Just as there are grounds for seeing the Inter-
net as a fluid domain, there are grounds for describing it as a highly structured and
regulated environment. While technological determinists tend to view the Internet
as open and non-heirarchical, cultural theorist Mark Tribe claims that he ‘cannot
help but view the Internet as a communal apartment of the Stalin era: no privacy,
everybody spies on everybody else, always present are lines for common areas such
as the toilet or the kitchen.’56 In suggesting that everyone can be surveilled and con-
trolled, Tribe’s contests the binary of the ‘West and the rest’.
In the face of criticism by writers like Baudrillard, Timothy Allen Jackson en-
courages us to see digital technology’s diverse potentialities: ‘to envision the
transformative potential of cyberspace, as well as its implicit limitations’.57 Jack-
son argues that by broadening our understanding of globalisation’s technological
impacts, we might articulate perceptions of ‘rootlessness, alienation, and psycho-
logical distance between individuals and groups on the one hand, and fantasies (or
nightmares) or electronic propinquity on the other.’58 By viewing these affects as
54 Peter Brooker, (Ed.), Modernism/Postmodernism, p. 24.
55 Tim Lenoir, ‘Foreword’, pp. ix–x.
56 Mark Tribe, ‘Foreword’ in The Language of New Media, p. xi.
57 Timothy Allen Jackson, ‘Towards a New Media Aesthetic’, p. 349.
58 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in a Global Cultural Economy’, p. 47.
49Affective Readings
differential and non-uniform, we might review universal assumptions about digiti-
sation and globalisation’s affects. The perception of globalisation’s ‘technoscapes’
as spatially, temporally, and kinetically dynamic might provide a way for thinking
about globalisation and digital art in complementary terms: as temporally organic
evolving phenomena.
Affective Readings
Globalisation is often described in binary terms: either causing of fragmentation
and disintegration, and simulation,59 or heightening our consciousness of the world
as a connected place. In their text The Global Village: Transformations in World
Life and Media in the 21st Century, Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers de-
scribe new senses of human connectedness and the rise of the ‘global village’.60
Yet, these analyses construct a binary of fragmentation-connection that arguably
overlooks the polymorphic iterations of experience. Human encounters are often
inter-changeable, contradictory, or simultaneously love-hate; thereby blurring the
boundaries of ‘either-or’ (Fig. 3.3).
The issue is particularly pertinent, if interpretation is seen to be variable, unpre-
dictable, and contigent upon context. On an Internet chat forum, for example, a user
may enjoy strong senses of emotional connection, yet detest the lack of physical
proximity. In a different way, the global media coverage of September 11, 2001
instilled in many shifting waves of feelings: from shock to de-sensitisation followed
by a desire to connect. What these examples suggest, is that affects are not static:
they are often fleeting, contingent and contradictory.
Highly structured articulations often fail to express the movements and iterations
of these impacts. They also fall short in the articulation of affect. Like globalisa-
tion, affective response is fluid, formed of surges in and between the real and the
imaginary; the virtual and the physical; the rational and the abstract; the actual and
surreal. Theories drawn from universal constants can tend to negate the flux of
bodily awareness and individual sentience. While these theories may be useful in
describing fixed structures and systems, affective approaches can facilitate more
human-centric understandings of phenomena.
However, to perceive globalisation as a conglomerate of its affects may reveal
how in variant contexts, individuals experience phenomena differently. For exam-
ple, an individualrespond differently to its impacts: from expressing resistance to
technological change; to an appreciation of expanded financial markets; alarm at
59 For a discussion of simulation in relation to the rise of digital communications and the global
mass media see: Jean Baudrillard, “From ‘Simulcra and Simulations” in Peter Brooker (Ed.), Mod-
ernism/Postmodernism, London, Longman, 1992.
60 Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers, The Global Village: Transformations in World Life
and Media in the Twenty-first Century, New York, Oxford University Press, 1989.
50 3 Globalisation and Digital Art
the rise of global terror networks; an embrace of global communications and knowl-
edge sharing; or apprehension in response to the growth of travel and diaspora.
The broad range of globalisation’s impacts—and the complexity of responses to
them—seem to call for more personal means of articulation. Without such means of
expression individuals may be left feeling that globalisation is impossible to express
in personal terms, and therefore beyond their grasp or level of influence.
The ‘open’ and fluid methods of Arjun Appadurai and Arturo Escobar—centred
upon subjectivity and difference—might facilitate a broader range of articulations.
As Escobar, Sonia Alvarez, and Evelina Dagnino contend:
[t]he forms of subjectivity that we inhabit play a crucial part in determining whether we
accept or contest existing power relations. Moreover, for marginalised and oppressed
groups, the construction of new and resistant identities is a key dimension of a wider politi-
cal struggle to transform society.61
The writers’ focus upon subjective interpretation returns the autonomy of experi-
ence to the individual. In reviewing these ideas, this chapter proposes that globalisa-
tion generates multiple impacts, which can be contradictory and fluctuating. In one
context, for example, an individual might experience globalisation’s technological
divides. In another, however, they might reap the financial rewards of global mar-
kets and new economic flows. In generating contradictory perceptions of globalisa-
tion, these paradoxes point to the value of an affective, human-centric approach.
This text conceptualises affect as an an apprehension or bodily response: a sen-
sory or affective process involving individual intuition, interpretation, memory, and
bodily reaction. In his discussion of affect, Marc Augé writes that any generalised
claim ‘is plainly reckless’62 because it reduces the complexity and specificity of hu-
man difference and response. In ascribing a kind of ‘crude empathy’,63 Jill Bennett
argues that general claims are premised upon ‘a very reductive form of observation
61 Sonia Alvarez et al., ‘The Cultural and Political in Latin American Social Movement’ in Cul-
tures of Politics and Politics of Culture: The Cultural and the Political in Latin American Social
Movements, Boulder, Westview Press, 1998, p. 5.
62 Marc Augé, The War of Dreams, (Trans. L. Heron), London, Pluto Press, 1999, p. 7.
63 Jill Bennett, ‘Face-to-Face Encounters: Testimonial Imagery and the South African Truth and
Reconciliation Commission’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, Vols. 2–3, 2001–2002,
p. 41.
Fig. 3.3 Lara Baladi, Alone, Together…In Media Res, 2012. (3 channel video installation, 42 min,
Image courtesy of the artist, 2012)
51Conclusion
based not upon any thorough or sustained engagement or understanding but on a
spurious identification with select features of another’s experience’.64
In his exploration of affect, Mark Hansen invokes French philosopher Henri
Bergson’s theories of perception and affect. Bergson’s texts describe the individual
body ‘as a kind of filter that selects, from among the universe of images circulat-
ing around it and according to its own embodied capacities, precisely those that
are relevant to it’.65 The body in Bergson’s account becomes the ‘glue’ that binds
interpretation and response.66 Hansen posits that through ‘placing the embodied
viewer-participant into a circuit with information’67 digital artworks might operate
as ‘laboratories for the conversion of information into corporeally apprehensible
images’.68 By facilitating this ‘conversion’, digital artworks might offer means for
transforming experiences of globalisation into perceptually and ‘corporeally ap-
prehensible images’.69
Conclusion
As explored further in the previous chapter, art is an experiential construct, which
can facilitate alternative perspectives, and generate affective ways of ‘seeing’ and
experiencing the external world. Its technical and discursive tools can facilitate new
articulations of globalisation’s shifts, and contribute a new critical voice. Through
making room for micro encounters in the articulation of art and globalisation, digi-
tal art might return the autonomy of experience to the individual.
The next chapter launches a discussion on a style of digital art that is uniquely
engaged with its moment of production. It suggests that the radical art of Ross
Mawdsley, ®™ark, and The Yes Men is borne of a particular moment in time, shar-
ing a unique history with globalisation and digitisation. The chapter ‘Digital Art
and Political Revolt’, connects net.art and hactivism to wider political protests to
globalisation. Finally, it shows how digital art offers diverse means for conceptual-
ising the external world, as well as fresh ways of thinking about globalisation as a
cultural phenomenon.
64 Jill Bennett, ‘Face-to-Face Encounters’, p. 41.
65 Mark B.N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, p. 3.
66 Tim Lenoir, ‘Foreword’, p. xxiv.
67 Mark B.N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, p. 11.
68 Mark B.N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, p. 11.
69 Mark B.N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, p. 11.
53
Chapter 4
Digital Art and Political Revolt
M. Langdon, The Work of Art in a Digital Age: Art, Technology and Globalisation,
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4939-1270-4_4, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Introduction
Building upon the discourses on digital art explored in previous chapters, this chap-
ter engages with art works that explore the idea of political revolt. These radical
expressions show how digital art can both perpetuate—and break free from—ear-
lier discourses and practices in art. This chapter focusses on the tactical art of Ross
Mawdsley, ®™ark, and The Yes Men. It shows how resistance can be innovative,
creative and essentially artistic. Their works are contextualised in terms of back-
lashes to globalisation and expressions of political revolt. This chapter suggests
that while the form may be different, digital art messages often continue dialogues
established by earlier works of art (Fig. 4.1).
Enactments of Global Revolt
Ross Mawdsley is one of the United Kingdom’s earliest digital artists, and a strong
critic of globalisation. His opposition is manifested in a series of online volumes
published in 2000 as part of the anthology Simian.1 The term ‘simian’ reveals some-
thing of his take: that globalisation is diminishing cultural difference, and turning
individuals into ape-like replicas of each other. Mawdsley’s art aligns globalisation
to earlier projects of imperialism. In the volume Revolt, this connection becomes
clear. The artwork slowly unfolds to reveal a man wielding a rifle. The image of an
Asian gun-man, evokes the possibility of ‘other’ actors rising up against Western
cultural and political regimes. The graphic is overlayed with the text:
The world is a dangerous and unstable place at the moment. Riots, civil disorder, urban
unrest and war are rife right across the globe. People are rising up and making a stand.
1 Ross Mawdsley, Simian, <http://www.simian.nu>, 2000, (accessed 6 February 2001). This link
is no longer active.
54 4 Digital Art and Political Revolt
This day has been coming a long time. The revolution will not be televised. The day of the
simian is upon us.2
Mawdsley’s appropriation of Public Enemy’s slogan: ‘the revolution will not be
televised’,3 links his art to popular expressions of revolt.
Ross Mawdsley expresses a concern about the demise of individuality, through
the repetition of simian clones in Revolt and Journey Into Darkness. To ‘enter’
Journey Into Darkness is to be struck by emotive images of chemical warfare, sui-
cide, terrorism, ethnic exploitation, and prostitution. Each is articulated in terms of
globalisation’s political-economic impacts. Mawdsley strongly attributes the rise
of global corporate culture and ideology, to the decay of individualism. This theme
2 Ross Mawdsley, ‘Revolt’, Simian, <http://www.simian.nu>, 1993, (accessed 6 February 2001).
This link is no longer active.
3 The phrase was used by Public Enemy on their album: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us
Back, New York, Def Jam/Columbia Records, 1988.
Fig. 4.1 ®™ark, Promotional Still, 2000. (http://www.rtmark.com/images/bitygraphgs.jpg 2007)
55Enactments of Global Revolt
is expressed through the emblazoning of UK pharmaceutical brand Boots™ on a
razor blade, and contradictory brandishing of tribal or ‘particular’, insignia upon
the disembodied black form. The slow, fatalistic crawl of the insect across the blade
portrays a sense of hopeless imminence to the global ‘take-over’ of culture and
individuality, while the disembodied male torso suggests a lack of resistance, and
an absence of critical mind. The objectification of the black form, suggests that
non-Western actors have little say or opportunity for resistance, against the idioms
inflicted upon them by Western corporations (Fig. 4.2).
Within the work Revolt the ironic portrayal of simians wearing Che Guevara be-
rets in Melbourne and references to ‘The Revolution’ engage with Frankfurt School
uses of imagery in the formation of Marxist critique. Set to the sounds of a sombre
aural refrain, Melbourne presents an ominous account of globalisation. As popula-
tion dots move across a globe, the cities of Tokyo, Croatia, Norway, Havana, Liv-
erpool, and Melbourne are identified. Moments later, six video screens appear, with
the option of user selection made evident. Although each represents a different loca-
tion, they all depict the same images of rioting and affray. The similarity in footage
suggests parallel enactments of revolt and dissidence across the world.
In the Simian series, Mawdsley uses interactive technology to generate individ-
ual responses to globalisation. In the volume Tokyo Love Hotel Mistake, the user is
invited inside a Tokyo brothel. An Asian prostitute greets us in broken English. She
attempts to gain our custom with the cliché: ‘well baby, me so horny: me love you
long time’.4 Within seconds of this dialogue, a JVC branded video camera appears,
with the ‘play’ button lit up. Pressing ‘play’ changes the blank screen to a video clip
of a Western client engaging in her services. As the action plays out, dollar signs
scroll down the page along with the slogan: ‘[w]hat can I have for $ 400?’.5 fol-
lowed by the client’s defence: ‘it was only one night’.6 Set to rhythmic beats, Tokyo
Love Hotel Mistake portrays the Asian sex-trade as a form of global discrimination.
Mawdsley’s Tokyo Love Hotel Mistake offers a bleak insight into the Asian sex-
trade and its abuse by Western nationals. It suggests that global consumption has
4 Ross Mawdsley, ‘Tokyo Love Hotel Mistake’, Simian <http://www.simian.nu>, 2000, (accessed
6 February 2001). This link is no longer active.
5 Ross Mawdsley, ‘Tokyo Love Hotel Mistake’, <http://www.simian.nu>.
6 Ross Mawdsley, ‘Tokyo Love Hotel Mistake’, <http://www.simian.nu>.
Fig. 4.2 Ross Mawdsley,
Journey Into Darkness, 2000.
(http://www.simian
.nu).
56 4 Digital Art and Political Revolt
influenced the strategic marketing of this exploitative ‘product’. Tokyo Love Hotel
Mistake shows how globalisation has facilitated a rise in international travel and
‘tours’ such as these. As such, Mawdsley’s art connects globalisation to forms of
Western imperialism, exploitation of local cultures, and flow of goods and capital
across borders.
In Tokyo Love Hotel Mistake, Mawdsley presents the user with distinct choices.
One option is to press ‘play’ on a video camera and watch an illicit prostitution
scene. This action might be seen to make the user a witting consumer and voyeur,
echoing Manovich’s claim that ‘making a choice involves a moral responsibility’.7
This claim is more applicable to didactic works, where users are required to make
moral decisions in order for the narrative to progress. Lawrence Grossberg, how-
ever, argues that the very complexity of art’s situation within globalisation indicates
that ‘such artistic practices, even if they situate the audience as consumer, may also
situate them in other contradictory subject-positions’,8 including bringing to light
illuminate our ethical dilemmas. Mawdsley’s critique of globalisation, however, is
compromised by the use of didactic imagery, which simplify complex issues. The
generalised portrayal of a Thai prostitute, Asian gunman and disembodied black
torso, encourage crude and reductive understandings of others’ traumas and experi-
ences. Ross Mawdsley’s backlash to globalisation in Tokyo Love Hotel Mistake is
underscored by the sense that global consumption leads to the standardisation of
culture (Fig. 4.3).
7 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, p. 44.
8 Lawrence Grossberg, Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays on Popular Culture, Durham, Duke
University Press, 1997, p. 155.
Fig. 4.3 Ross Mawdsley, Tokyo Love Hotel Mistake, 2000. (http://www.simian.nu)
57®™ark
®™ark
As a radical alliance of digital artists, programmers and activists, ®™ark
( pronounced ‘art mark’) use digital art to address a perceived lack of critical press
on globalisation. Within their works, they raise questions about corporate hege-
mony and political legitimacy. Through documenting and parodying the actions of
corporate power brokers, the artists attempt to repossess global media. ®™ark’s
actions have included political interventions and depositions. Using a combination
of hacking and activism termed ‘hactivism’, ®™ark have targeted perceived per-
petuators of global exploitation, ranging from The George W. Bush administration
to the World Trade Organization, World Health Organization and World Bank. Their
use of interventionist tactics such as hacking, floodnetting, phishing, digital sabo-
tage and hijack connect their art earlier political art styles, including Pop Art, 1908s
Electronica, and Situatist, Dadaist and Frankfurt School works (Fig. 4.4).
One of ®™ark’s earliest interventions was a campaign against online toy dis-
tributor eToys™.9 The case began as a clash over domain names, with ®™ark argu-
ing that it lodged the domain ‘www.Etoy.com’10 before the toy company’s eToys
domain.11 Yet, the similarity in names led to the company’s concern at being mis-
taken with the art organisation. In late 1999, eToys made an offer of US$ 500,000
in cash and stocks to ®™ark for their domain name rights. ®™ark declined the
offer, which led to a legal suit against the artists. eToys succeeded in gaining an in-
junction that prevented ®™ark from operating their similarly named site. Although
®™ark’s site was lodged first and eToys had never been cited on the site, it was
ruled that the similarity in names, and the nature of ®™ark’s activities—seen to
include ‘pornography and calls to violence’12—were damaging to the toy compa-
ny’s business. ®™ark however, vehemently opposed the claims that their site was
9 See: eToys, <http://www.etoys.com>, (accessed 6 July 2014).
10 See: Etoy,<http://www.etoy.com>, (accessed 6 July 2014).
11 See:
®™
ark, <http://www.rtmark.com/legacy/etoymain.html>, (accessed 26 April 2007). Link
no longer active.
12
®™
ark, <http://www.rtmark.com>.
Fig. 4.4 ®™ark, Promo-
tional Still, 2000. (http://
rtmark.com/ads.html)
58 4 Digital Art and Political Revolt
violent and/or pornographic, arguing that ‘only a primitive conception of art could
lead one to see pornography or violence on its pages’.13
In 1999, ®™ark launched its counter-attack on eToys, in the form of a satiri-
cal multi-player game featuring Lego® men in military uniforms.14 The objective
was to force the crash of eToys’ website, thereby affecting customer access and
the company’s market share. The game’s mission statement read: ‘[o]n your team,
thousands of players. Your opponents: eToys and its shareholders—as long as they
still own shares. The stakes: art, free expression and life on the Internet’.15 A key
tactic used in the campaign was ‘floodnetting’, a program specifically designed
for ®™ark’s campaign. Floodnetting was centred upon an applet called ‘Flood-
Net’ developed by Electronic Disturbance Theater—a radical group that used art
to instigate forms of civil disobedience. As Coco Fusco writes, the FloodNet applet
produced ‘a command that retools the usual “refresh” or “ reload” button on a web
server’.16
In December 1999, the applet was offered to users from around the globe to
simultaneously login and crash the eToys site. ®™ark’s ‘web-jamming’ had detri-
mental consequences for the company’s trade. The tactic, coupled with the hacking
of search engines so that ‘Etoy’ came up first, revealed the extent of ®™ark’s re-
volt. The collaboration defended its use of invasive tactics, arguing that ‘eToys
says etoy.com is hurting sales by disturbing those who stumble upon it’,17 but the
company is also
disturbing people who want to see great Internet art but stumble upon eToys instead, and so
why not say eToys shouldn’t exist? Why should financial might make right? If they want to
play by barbaric rules, we will too.18
The case of ®™ark versus eToys suggested an ongoing antagonism between radical
artists and global corporations, as well as world leaders and NGOs seen to support
globalisation’s market economy.
In constructing itself as a ‘corporation’ of artists, ®™ark blurs the boundar-
ies between art and commerce. The collective seems to confirm Frith and Home’s
sense, as expressed by Lawrence Grossberg, that ‘texts cannot be separated from
their market effects’.19 On ®™ark’s website they state that they are ‘indeed just a
corporation’.20 In their use of global media to extend operations, the group ironi-
cally replicates the actions of the companies it protests. The artists’ name invokes
13 ®™ark, <http://www.rtmark.com>.
14 ®™ark was later forced to remove all Lego® images from their campaigns.
15
®™
ark, <http://www.rtmark.com>.
16 Coco Fusco, ‘The Unbearable Weightness of Beings: Art in Mexico after NAFTA’, The Bodies
that Were Not Ours: And Other Writings, London, Routledge, 2001, p. 70.
17
®™
ark, <http://www.rtmark.com>.
18 ®™ark, <http://www.rtmark.com>.
19 Lawrence Grossberg, Dancing in Spite of Myself, p. 154.
20 ®™ark, <http://www.rtmark.com>.
59The Yes Men
corporate trademarks, while their ‘dot.com’ domain is evocative of commercial
websites. The group’s advertisement of projects with financial rewards strengthens
this link.21 Yet, while ®™ark is constructed like a corporation—benefitting from
corporate protections and shareholder investment—its artists contend that unlike its
opponents, its ‘bottom line’ ‘is to improve culture, rather than its own pocketbook;
it seeks cultural profit, not financial’.22 They claim that just as:
ordinary corporations are solely and entirely machines to increase their shareholders’
wealth (often to the detriment of culture and life) so ®™ark is a machine to improve its
shareholders’ culture and life (sometimes to the detriment of corporate wealth).23
®™ark insist that their members ‘will never promote a project that is likely to result
in physical harm to humans. That is ®™ark’s only ethical compunction’.24 Through
an internal system of communications exclusively available to its ‘share holders’,
the collective maintains its members’ anonymity. The provision of an external ‘face’
via a website ‘advertising’ its activities and goals, simulates the organisation of a
global corporation. On this public site, ®™ark encourages new members to ‘invest’
in its campaigns.
The Yes Men
The campaigns of radical art collective The Yes Men are strongly sympathetic to
®™ark’s protests to globalisation. They describe themselves as honest people im-
personating ‘big-time criminals’ in order to humiliate them.25 As they declare on
their website:
The Yes Men agree their way into the fortified compounds of commerce, ask questions, and
then smuggle out the stories of their hijinks to provide a public glimpse at the behind-the-
scenes world of business. In other words, the Yes Men are team players… but they play for
the opposing team.26
The Yes Men have besieged some of the world’s most prominent corporations
through their physical and virtual attacks. Through ‘hijacking’ websites, staging
‘sit-ins’ at press conferences, releasing a documentary film and conducting ‘spoof’
television interviews, they have drawn wide public attention to their activities. Each
intervention or ‘hijink’ is proudly listed on The Yes Men site.27
The artists use the principle of ‘identity correction’ to justify their form of hactiv-
ism. Central to their campaign is the program Reamweaver™, a piece of software
21 ®™ark, <http://www.rtmark.com>.
22 ®™ark, <http://www.rtmark.com>.
23 ®™ark, <http://www.rtmark.com>.
24 ®™ark, <http://www.rtmark.com>.
25 The Yes Men, <http://www.theyesmen.org>.
26 The Yes Men, <http://www.theyesmen.org>.
27 The Yes Men, <http://www.theyesmen.org>.
60 4 Digital Art and Political Revolt
that gains website templates allowing the artists to ‘spoof’ or replicate opponents’
sites. The point of spoofing, argue the collaborators, is to create a moment where us-
ers question what they are looking at. Like their ®™ark counterparts, The Yes Men
show a sophisticated use of art, complementing their virtual and physical protests.
Their virtual presence on the Internet—and physical calls for street action in cities
like Salzburg and Melbourne—enables their forms of political art to reach wide
audiences.
In 1999, The Yes Men registered the web domain GWBush.com. Through their
‘spoof’ site, the artists sought to attract genuine users who intended to access the
legitimate GeorgeWBush.com site. Using software to grab the graphics and layout
form the original site, the artists created a spoof site in near replica. In following
the principle of détournement, The Yes Men’s intention was to catch users unaware
and, upon having their attention, explain what they saw to be the ‘real’ motives of
George W. Bush: ‘to help the rich at the expense of the poor and the environment’.28
Like their protests to the Bush administration, The Yes Men’s backlash to the
World Trade Organization (WTO) have attracted global controversy. Their key ob-
jective in this campaign was to cast light onto the human effects of the WTO’s
economic policies. The Yes Men claimed:
the facts are that in the last 25 years the poor of the world have gotten even poorer…while
the rich have gotten astronomically richer. And all that during the implementation of poli-
cies that the WTO claim will help the poor.29
Using the domain name http://www.gatt.org, reminiscent of the acronym ‘GATT’
for the 1999 WTO Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, The Yes Men set up a ri-
val site with content appropriated from their opponents’ web pages. The timing was
strategic, coinciding with the World Trade Organization’s Seattle Ministerial held
in November 1999. The WTO’s reaction to the spoof site was immediate: on No-
vember 23rd 1999, a press release was given condemning The Yes Men’s spoof site.
Relishing the publicity, the collaboration responded with further tactical campaigns.
On May 2000, The Yes Men gate crashed the International Legal Studies Confer-
ence in Salzburg. Posing as members of the WTO, they presented a paper making
outlandish calls for economic productivity at any cost. They suggested, for example,
that Spain be forced to eradicate its tradition of ‘siesta’ because of its detrimental
effects upon market efficiency. They argued further that market principles should
be extended into the political realm, with votes legally bought and sold on election
‘share markets’. Ironically, much of the audience was said to blindly support the
claims made. In their own words:
[s]ome audience members are intrigued, and ask interesting questions; some, however, are
dismayed by the insults to Italians, and Andy must explain that he is simply being more
frank than the WTO usually is, and is presenting its message more clearly than normal. No
one objects to Dr. Bichlbauer’s scheme for American voting; perhaps they are just being
polite?30
28 ®™ark, <http://www.rtmark.org>.
29 The Yes Men, <http://www.theyesmen.org>.
30 The Yes Men, <http://www.theyesmen.org>.
61The Yes Men
On the 6th July 2001, The Yes Men received an email from the CNBC television
program Market Wrap Europe. The station had located the ‘GATT’ domain and,
confusing it with the legitimate WTO site, were seeking an expert to discuss the
‘Group of Eight’ (G8) protests in Genoa.31 ‘Andy’, a member of The Yes Men, hap-
pily obliged. Disguised as a WTO representative in a business suit, Andy joined the
live forum which was televised from CNBC’s Paris studio. Seated alongside high
profile lobbyist, Barry Coates, Andy assumed the identity of Granwyth Hulatberi.
The host Nigel Roberts, proceeded to introduce the prominent World Development
Movement anti-globalisation activist Barry Coates and Vernon Ellis, the Interna-
tional Chairman of Andersen Consulting. Ellis opened with the statement: ‘I do
believe that multinational corporations can be good for business’.32 ‘Granwyth’
agreed, in extolling the virtues of free enterprise, capitalism and the global economy
(Fig. 4.5).
Granwyth proceeded to inform his opponent Barry Coates that the privatisation
of education would hail in a new era of thought, so that the next generation would
think differently about global commerce. Granwyth argued that youths would reap
the rewards of free trade and revert to the philosophies of Friedman and Darwin,
as they embraced the dictum: ‘the rich are right because they have power, and the
poor are wrong because they don’t’.33 After the interview, the station was apparently
none the wiser and sent a copy of the proceedings to The Yes Men.
The Yes Men’s hijinks engage with backlashes to globalisation, and as Inda and
Rosaldo express, the perceived installation worldwide of western versions of ba-
sic social-cultural reality: the West’s epistemological and ontological theories, its
values, ethical systems, approaches to rationality, technical-scientific worldview,
31 The ‘Group of Eight’ refers to the eight global economic powers: Canada, France, Germany,
Italy, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
32 The Yes Men, <http://www.theyesmen.org>.
33 The Yes Men, <http://www.theyesmen.org>.
Fig. 4.5 The Yes Men,
CNBC, Market Wrap, 2000.
(http://www.theyesmen.org/
en/node/112)
62 4 Digital Art and Political Revolt
political culture, and so on.34 Central to the ensemble’s campaigns is the question of
how economic globalisation affects non-western actors. In arguing that behind the
WTO’s actions ‘there is a bizarre logic that supported colonialism,35 The Yes Men
offer an account of globalisation centred upon the West’s political, economic and
ideological infiltration of other cultures.
Globalisation and Political Protest
In protesting against the WTO, The Yes Men suggest that Western nations have
used their political and economic might to take advantage of weaker states. Those
actions include making its currency the international reserve and exploiting cheap
service and production opportunities within Asia and the Third World. This presen-
tation is echoed in Ross Mawdsley’s depiction of the Asian trade and its abuse by
Western nationals in Tokyo Love Hotel Mistake. These outcomes, argues cultural
theorist Pierre Bourdieu, ensure that powerful Western nations not only influences,
but decide ‘the rules of the game’.36 This can lead to one-way economic flows that
entrench the binary of advantage and disadvantage. As the power of non-Western
nations diminishes, so too their cultural and political visibility is lessened or over-
shadowed, by more powerful economic nations. What transpires, is a predicament
in which the oppressed can never re-gain control.
By challenging the political-economic platforms of the WTO, The Yes Men vo-
calise a fear that local cultures will be subsumed into a global cultural centrifuge.
Their account
attributes the increasing synchronization of world culture to the ability of transnational
capital, most often seen as US-dominated and mass-mediated, to distribute cultural goods
around the globe.37
This ‘synchronisation’ or standardisation of culture and political economy is to many
critics, one of the most alarming facets of globalisation. As Kenneth Frampton and
Paul Ricoeur express, this can lead to ‘a mediocre civilisation’,38 whereby suddenly
‘throughout the world, one finds the same bad movie, the same slot machines, the
same plastic or aluminium atrocities, the same twisting of language by propaganda’.39
34 Jonathon Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, (Eds.), The Anthropology of Globalization, p. 14.
35 The Yes Men, ‘CNBC Market Wrap Still’, <http://www.theyesmen.org/en/node/112>. Link is
no longer active.
36 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Myth of ‘Globalisation’ and the European Welfare State’ in Acts of Resis-
tance: Against the New Myths of Our Time, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2001, p. 38.
37 Jonathon Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, (Eds.), The Anthropology of Globalization, p. 13.
38 Kenneth Frampton and Paul Ricoeur, ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Ar-
chitecture of Resistance’, in Hal Foster (Ed.) The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture,
Seattle, Bay Press, 1983, p. 16.
39 Kenneth Frampton and Paul Ricoeur ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism’, p. 16.
63Ideological Revolt
Yet, alarmist accounts of globalisation—like those of digitisation—can be simplistic
and reductive, in failing to acknowledge the diverse impacts phenomena, which are
often both positive and negative. To this end, works by artists such as Ross Mawdsley,
®™ark and The Yes Men tell only part of the tale. As Inda and Rosaldo note, there
can be positive impacts as well, for the ‘deterritorialisation of culture is invariably the
occasion for the reinsertion of culture in new time-space contexts’.40
Cultural Imperialism
The artistic critiques of Ross Mawdsley, ®™ark and The Yes Men locate globali-
sation alongside Imperialism: the expansion of the British Raj, the colonisation of
‘new’ lands, and the exploitation of indigenous people. Post-colonial critiques of
globalisation might perceive it as the generator of a certain power dynamic, with
political-economic hegemony flowing primarily in one direction: from the West to
‘the rest’. The artists’ expressions construct binaries between centres and peripher-
ies; with the periphery cultures of the developing world, located well outside of the
realm of political-economic influence.
In exploiting the Internet’s ability to generate global publicity, Ross Mawdsley,
®™ark, and The Yes Men emulate the corporations that they protest. Through at-
tempting to gain control of mass communications systems, ®™ark, and The Yes
Men recognise the power of the global media. George Landow claims that ‘[i]n trac-
ing our way through such intricate works…we should not forget their place within
the strongly hierarchical, well sign-posted and ordered space of the Net’.41 Equally,
while the art of Ross Mawdsley, ®™ark and The Yes Men’s seeks to represent the
politically marginalised, the politics of the ‘digital divide’ means that this audience
would likely have limited access to the Internet. Poor infrastructure, inferior speed,
inadequate bandwidth and digital illiteracy means that the people that these artists
speak about, are probably unable to enter the conversation. There is a clear danger
in speaking on behalf of others, for as previously discussed in relation to Tokyo Love
Hotel Mistake, it can generalise and reduce others’ experiences.
Ideological Revolt
The expressions of Ross Mawdsley, ®™ark and The Yes Men resonate with Marx-
ist discourses and Situationist interventions. Their practices are defined by content
appropriation, or ‘cutting and pasting’ without reference. The collaborators’ encour-
agement of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing and collaborative production, presents
40 Jonathon Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, (Eds.), The Anthropology of Globalization, p. 11.
41 The Yes Men, <http://www.theyesmen.org>.
64 4 Digital Art and Political Revolt
a vision of art as open and democratic. Through encouraging their work to be ap-
propriated and reproduced, Ross Mawdsley, ®™ark and The Yes Men challenge
principles of artistic autonomy.
In opposing the ideal of ‘art for art’s sake’, Karl Marx held that art did not belong
in an ivory tower but on the streets of society.42 Through their global collaborations
and enactments of revolt, ®™ark and The Yes Men challenge the limits of art pro-
duction and the formal principles of originality, authenticity, aura and authorship.
While cooperation has long existed in the arts, digitisation enables artistic alliance
to take place on a global scale. A digital artwork can be streamed from the Internet
in ‘real-time’ or globally saved as data on CDs, thumb drives, and disks. It is in con-
versation with these discourses, that Ross Mawdsley, ®™ark, and The Yes Men’s
political protests push the boundaries of analogue art.
By connecting economic outcomes with cultural and political affects, Ross
Mawdsley, ®™ark, and The Yes Men offer Marxist critiques of capital, art and
politics. Laurie Schneider claims that ‘Marx believed that the production of art nec-
essarily depended on its immediate context’,43 or in this case, globalisation. In his
1935−1939 Notebooks, the Marxist and Social Realist Bertolt Brecht, argued that
art, ‘if it is truthful, must also reflect decay’.44 Brecht, writes Schenider Adams,
believed that ‘unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show
the world as changeable. And help to change it’.45 According to this account, art
functions as something more than a sublime construct: it becomes a means for in-
citing social and political change. As revealed in Chap. 2, throughout the 1930s
and 1940s, the tensions between art and production were drawn tight by the Marx-
ist ‘ revisionists’ of the Frankfurt School: Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max
Horkheimer, Leo Lowenthal, and Herbert Marcuse. Through acting as self-appoint-
ed social ‘watchdogs’, artists like Mawdsley, ®™ark and The Yes Men take on
some of the responsibilities formerly attributed to nation states.
Although some fear that globalisation will lead to art becoming a commodity that
alienates artists from their works,46 ®™ark, and The Yes Men have embraced this
commercialisation. By establishing themselves as ‘corporations’ and advertising
projects for ‘sponsorship’, they control the political-economy of their art. ®™ark
and The Yes Men claim that in emulating the structure of global corporations, their
organisations are ‘perfectly capable of acting in concert, of long-term forward plan-
ning, and of systematic destruction of their opponents’.47 Corporate principles influ-
ence the political strategies of both artistic groups, with ®™ark claiming that their
‘bottom line’ is to improve culture:
42 Laurie Schneider Adams, The Methodologies of Art, p. 59.
43 The Yes Men, <http://www.theyesmen.org>.
44 Laurie Schneider Adams, The Methodologies of Art, p. 63.
45 Laurie Schneider Adams, The Methodologies of Art, p. 62.
46 For a discussion of this idea see: Alan Bradshaw, ‘The Alienated Artist and the Political Econ-
omy of Organised Art’, Consumption Markets&Culture, Vol.9 , Issue 2, June 2006, pp. 111−117.
47 Julian Stallabrass, Internet Art, p. 95.
65Net.Art Style
[j]ust as ordinary corporations are solely and entirely machines to increase their sharehold-
ers’ wealth, so ®™ark is a machine to improve its shareholders’ culture and life (sometimes
to the detriment of corporate wealth.48
®™ark has a clear understanding of how corporate structures can be used to gen-
erate creative ‘wealth’ and global output. The Yes Men also play with corporate
principles. Their 2009 documentary The Yes Men Fix The World centred upon two
political activists posing as corporate executives that managed to con big businesses
(Fig. 4.6).49
In their critique of the global mass media, Ross Mawdsley and ®™ark, The Yes
Men present a Baudrillardian critique of digital culture’s ‘representations of rep-
resentations’.50 Mawdsley’s depiction of simian clones in Revolt, for example, en-
gages with Baudrillard’s description of ‘Disney-like simulacra [entering] into every
facet of cultural life, emptying active content by exploiting images’.51 The notion
of ‘simulacra’ is central to Baudrillard’s claim that in a digital world, simulation
replaces reality, leading to a ‘hyperreal’ existence. As Darley elaborates, according
to this account contemporary culture ‘exists and grows entirely through self-refer-
ence, definitively uncoupled from traditional notions of representation (which en-
tails such concepts as “the referent”, “innovation”, “authenticity” and “the new”).’52
Net.Art Style
As the art of Ross Mawdsley, ®™ark, and The Yes Men demonstrates, the Internet
can operate as a critical space for the articulation of globalisation and digitisation’s
spatial, temporal and kinetic affects. Their art shows a deliberate use of digital tech-
nology, from their exploitation of ‘free’ spaces online, to manipulation of technical
glitches and incorporation of ‘spoofing’, ‘hacking’, and ‘floodnetting’ techniques
in their works. Geert Lovink claims that ‘many struggles appear to have left the
street and the factory floor and migrated into an ideological space of representation,
constructed by and through the media’.53 Yet, contrary to democratic or idealistic
constructions of the Internet, Lovink asserts that it
has not freed artists and activists from the necessity or perils of having to deal with institu-
tional politics. There is no Internet without power, cable policy, money and access rights.
Don’t believe the hype of a disembodied, pure and unspoiled Virtual Organisation.54
48 ®™ark, <http://www.rtmark.com>.
49 The Yes Men, ‘Still from The Yes Men Fix the World’, The Yes Men, <http://theyesmenfix-
theworld.com/>, 2009, (accessed 17 December 2010).
50 Michael Heim, Virtual Realism, p. 3.
51 Michael Heim, Virtual Realism, p. 3.
52 Andrew Darley, ‘The Digital Image in the Age of the Signifier’, p. 127.
53 Geert Lovink, Dark Fiber, p. 263.
54 Geert Lovink, Dark Fiber, p. 263.
66 4 Digital Art and Political Revolt
Revealing their understanding of these issues, ®™ark and The Yes Men use the
Internet to generate critical masses to fight these struggles. Their mass virtual and
physical protests reflect the awareness that to have any kind of impact, artists and
activists must collaborate on global campaigns.
®™ark and The Yes Men augment online and offline campaigns, as well as digi-
tal art with political activism. They reflect a hybrid approach to revolt, in taking to
Fig. 4.6 The Yes Men, The Yes Men Fix the World, 2009. (http://www.theyesmen.org)
67Net.Art Style
the streets, targeting military bases, orchestrating simultaneous online action, con-
structing ‘spoof’ campaigns and holding guerrilla film screenings. Their strategies
engage with one of the most striking characteristics of hactivist art: the augmenta-
tion of physical and virtual action. As Internet Theorist Geert Lovink writes, an
effective campaign ‘constantly mediates between the real and the virtual, switches
back and forth, unwilling to choose sides for the local or the global’.55 In these
ways, their works converse with what Stallabrass describes as ‘the actions of street
protestors attached to the new anti-capitalist politics, who have found ways of unit-
ing actions comparable to performance, environmental and installation art with
practical ends of subversion.56
®™ark and The Yes Men’s hacking of search engines, staging of political sit-ins,
and crashing of opponents’ sites may be seen as ‘guerrilla’ tactics. Yet, in seeking
to preserve the democracy of the Internet through giving voice to expressions of
revolt, they thwart and, at times, destroy users’ rights of access. The alliances do
not apologise for these affects. The radical artists ®™ark and The Yes Men claim to
‘attempt a redefinition of sabotage as social practice, but not in the usual destructive
sense, rather in a constructive, innovative and creative way’.57 That intent may be
questionable to users who stumble upon their sites by mistake. ®™ark and The Yes
Men’s use of pop-ups, hyperlinks and construction of replica ‘spoof’ sites, deliber-
ately disorient users searching for legitimate sites. Although their techniques may
be innovative in terms of art, the confusion and frustration caused can detract from
the message. Lovink notes that in some of these expressions there ‘is the faint hope
that if a campaign generates enough velocity and resonates with enough people, it
might just take on some of the qualities of a movement’.58 Yet, as Stallabrass con-
tends, some of these expressions to the contrary, have ‘an air of desperation to them,
a panicked rush to occupy a new and important territory’59.
In a scathing attack of early the net.artist Heath Bunting, critics Pit Schultz and
Timothy Druckrey scorn the ‘vanguard, innovatory, artist-on-the-edge’60 image,
which they argue is ‘not so far from the capitalist fantasy of Net pioneers explor-
ing the new frontier’.61 In an attack on the so-called ‘net intellegentsia’, Schultz
denounces artists like Bunting, and probably Mawdsley, who ‘believe themselves to
be the leading edge of the coming “Netzvolk”, updated modernist supermen riskily
performing at the boundary of commercialisation and institutionalisation’.62 Yet, as
Julian Stallabrass argues, ‘[t]here is a danger that the lack of context that enables
this effect also limits the work, since mere confusion, rather than a radical under-
mining of expectations, could be the result’.63 As Stallabrass argues ‘[t]he making
55 Geert Lovink, Dark Fiber, p. 262.
56 Julian Stallabrass, Internet Art, p. 95.
57 Geert Lovink, Dark Fiber, p. 271.
58 Geert Lovink, Dark Fiber, p. 257.
59 Julian Stallabrass, Internet Art, p. 90.
60 Julian Stallabrass, Internet Art, p. 89.
61 Julian Stallabrass, Internet Art, p. 89.
62 Julian Stallabrass, Internet Art, p. 89.
63 Julian Stallabrass, Internet Art, p. 94.
68 4 Digital Art and Political Revolt
of such complex structures, using blind links which leave the user disoriented, is so
regularly employed as to have become a cliché of internet art’.64 The cultivation of
critical context can be difficult for digital artists because of the range of online and
offline spaces in which their art is displayed. Their audiences are also so diverse,
from radical users actively engaging with their art, to children looking to buy toys
and accidentally happening upon ®™ark’s Etoy site.
There is a clear cohesion in the politics of Ross Mawdsley, ®™ark and The Yes
Men. While their campaigns reflect cultural-imperialist understandings of globali-
sation, they tend to focus upon generic effects: Americanisation, political exploita-
tion, cultural homogenisation, and capitalist forces of consumption. On ®™ark’s
website the artists write:
[f]or those people caught in the vague uncharted territory outside of business—politics, art,
dissent, community, or terror—there are clearly other standards. Is culture for everyone? It
turns out that the gap between the “haves” and “have-nots” is just as great whether we’re
talking about economic capital, or “cultural” capital.65
While ®™ark, Ross Mawdsley, and The Yes Men vocalise concern for globalisa-
tion’s impacts upon culture and capital, their approach is generally one-dimension-
al. From ®™ark’s punishment of eToys™—to The Yes Men’s limited explanation
of what ‘Americanisation’ and George W. Bush’s mean in the context of globalisa-
tion—the commentaries are at times reductive. As Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson
observe, the culture should be considered in flexible rather than discrete ways.66
As previously explored, cultural theorists Augé, Enwezor and Appadurai ap-
proach globalisation as a series of movements, advancing an approach that is
equally dynamic in accounting for the intricate flows of people, ideas, information,
ideologies and technologies across the globe. These dialogues counter the alarmist
tendency to reduce the phenomenon to either-or outcomes. Yet, in their examination
of globalisation’s human impacts and affects, Ross Mawdsley, ®™ark, and The Yes
Men fail to offer that level of critical nuance. Marc Augé, for example, challenges
the inter-changeable use of terms ‘globalisation’ and ‘Americanisation’. While he
acknowledges the popular fear of ‘being colonised’,67 he does claim ‘we don’t ex-
actly know who by; the enemy is not easily identifiable, and one can venture to
suggest that this feeling now exists all over the world, even in the United States’.68
In arguing that this sense of foray exists ‘even in the United States’,69 Augé sug-
gests that globalisation has no single ‘colonist’, with North Americans being just as
affected by globalisation’s shifts.
To base an analysis of globalisation on a ‘North America versus the rest of the
world’ dichotomy is problematic in the assumption that North America—or any
other nation—exhibits cultural uniformity. Augé denounces ‘[e]very generalised
prophecy that is based on a single sector of the social’.70 He argues that categorical
64 Julian Stallabrass, Internet Art, p. 59.
65
®™
ark,<http://www.rtmark.com/rtcom/protester>.
66 Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, Beyond Culture, p. 6.
67 Marc Augé, The War on Dreams, p. 6.
68 Marc Augé, The War on Dreams, p. 6.
69 Marc Augé, The War on Dreams, p. 6.
70 Marc Augé, The War on Dreams, p. 7.
69Political Critique
assumptions are ‘reckless’71 in their denial of the difference and ‘complexity of in-
novation within a global totality which is still broadly diversified’.72 Augé claims:
[i]t may very well be the case that culture is being dislodged from one locality and placed in
another, thus generally weakening the ties of culture to particular sites. But this says nothing
about the sort of culture that is being disembedded or about its origins and destinations.73
General and isomorphic accounts of politics and economy negate the ‘particular’
divergences of encounter and bodily affect. While Ross Mawdsley’s art generates
some user response, his deterministic engagement with digital media often compro-
mises the effectiveness of his message. One might claim that ‘[w]ithout the abil-
ity to reflect, the viewer’s perception is continuously structured by the totalizing
environment’.74 Under these conditions, Scott Weiland contends, ‘memory is read-
only’75 that is, limited in its capacity to respond.®™ark and The Yes Men’s expres-
sions however, show little engagement with individual experience and subjective
response. This issue recurs in much of the early digital art, defined by an excitement
for the technology rather than a critical awareness of how it might be used with
subtlety. To this end, digital artists might re-negotiate the boundaries of medium and
message—or politics and affect—in their address of globalisation.
Political Critique
The expressions of Ross Mawdsley, ®™ark and The Yes Men reveal a particular
style of critique; their art is understandable in terms of radical protests to globalisa-
tion. The tactical art of Ross Mawdsley, ®™ark and The Yes Men is an irreverent
style that opposes formal systems and structures of control. The digital expressions
of Ross Mawdsley, ®™ark, and The Yes Men also reflects strong postmodern ten-
dencies, in their critique of hegemonic structures and re-situation of media and
contexts. The use of tactics such as pop-ups, hyperlinks, stickiness and hacking
bombard and disorient users, forcibly raising awareness of cultural, political and
economic issues.
The radical art of Ross Mawdsley, ®™ark and The Yes Men’s offers Marxist
analyses of capitalism and consumption. ®™ark and The Yes Men’s construction
of spoof campaigns against authoritative bodies such the G.W. Bush administra-
tion and World Trade Organisation, also engages with Frankfurt School ideals.
Their shocking and subversive styles rely upon current contexts, which inform
their opposition to globalisation and its cultural, political and economic cultures
of production. The themes of Mawdsley’s art in particular, demonstrate concern
71 Marc Augé, The War on Dreams, p. 7.
72 Marc Augé, The War on Dreams, p. 7.
73 Jonathon Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, (Eds.), The Anthropology of Globalization, p. 13.
74 Scott Weiland, ‘Sense, Memory and Media’, <http://www.digitalartsource.com/content/featur/
feat17/feat17p1.html>.
75 Scott Weiland, ‘Sense, Memory and Media’, <http://www.digitalartsource.com/content/featur/
feat17/feat17p1.html>.
70 4 Digital Art and Political Revolt
over globalisation’s alleged standardisation of social values through modern mass
communications technology and advertising’. His work Journey into Darkness, for
example, features a razor blade with a corporate logo. Yet, the extent to which Ross
Mawdsley and for that matter ®™ark and The Yes Men, actively fulfil the ideal that
‘art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with
its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it’,76
is questionable.
The works of Ross Mawdsley, ®™ark, and The Yes Men strongly oppose for-
malist notions of art through raising questions about ownership, production and
intellectual property, that are paralleled in the debates that they raise through forums
on the Internet. Central to their art, is the assumption that images should be freely
accessed and manipulated, with the ability to cut and paste text and media and
change their meanings. The freedom to appropriate text and imagery is central to
®™ark and The Yes Men’s own creative practice. To enforce ownership over their
content would contravene their own actions. These ideas reflect their understand-
ings of art as open and collaborative, and their sense of global technology such as
the Internet as a liberal and democratic space. A concern for divergent expressions
underscores the art of Ross Mawdsley, ®™ark and The Yes Men.
In their criticism of global economics and the affects of capitalism upon develop-
ing nations, the artists ®™ark and The Yes Men set up rival ‘commercial’ websites
in order to express their opposition. These artists attempt ‘a redefinition of sabotage
as social practice, but not in the usual destructive sense, rather in a constructive, in-
novative and creative way’,77 with the intention of generating ‘a movement without
organs or organisations, with a variety of perspectives’.78 Their art sparks dialogues
on the structures and hegemonies of the Internet, as a global construct. While ex-
pressions of net.artists such as ®™ark and The Yes Men heighten awareness of
issues such as economic exploitation and subjugation, the level to which they con-
tribute to the resolution of these issues is questionable. Some of their gestures ap-
pear token and cursory, with Mawdsley’s depiction of prostitutes and black torsos
appearing as somewhat generalised and didactic constructions of the ‘other’.
The Centre and the Periphery
The art of Ross Mawdsley, ®™ark, and The Yes Men also converse with post-
colonial discourses underpinned by senses of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’. It reveals
an understanding of globalisation as intrinsically inequitable: generating unequal
levels of access to the core mechanisms of cultural and economic production: gov-
ernments, corporations, trade organisations and the mass media. According to this
reading, the ‘centre’ is much more likely to exploit the ‘periphery’. As Hannerz
elaborates, ‘[w]hen the center speaks, the periphery listens, and on the whole does
76 Laurie Schneider Adams, The Methodologies of Art, p. 62.
77 Geert Lovink, ‘An Insider’s Guide to Tactical Media’, p. 271.
78 Geert Lovink, ‘An Insider’s Guide to Tactical Media’, p. 271.
71The Centre and the Periphery
not talk back’79. Ross Mawdsley, ®™ark, and The Yes Men’s incorporation of post-
colonial discourse, connects globalisation’s cultural de-territorialisations to earlier
colonisations. In the work Modernism/Postmodernism, Peter Brooker explores this
construction of globalisation, and argues that it is
intimately connected to the blunt facts of economic, political and military power, that has
confirmed America and the West’s controlling cultural influence—including the magnetism
of its mythologies and the control Western intellectuals exercise over communication sys-
tems and regimes of truth.80
Brooker presents globalisation as perpetuating the same Western ‘mythologies’ used
to justify earlier projects of imperialism. Yet, the focus upon the West’s ‘controlling
cultural influence’ creates a binary between Western cultures and ‘the other’, imply-
ing that globalisation’s affects are universally either-or. As Inda and Rosaldo dis-
cuss, discourses led by cultural imperialism tend to present dichotomous accounts
of globalisation.81 Central to this understanding, is the role of North American cul-
ture and ideology in ‘leading to the cultural homogenisation of the world’.82
In Chap. 2, alarmism was explored in relation to Naomi Klein’s texts, and showed
how this approach tends to systemise globalisation according to binary impacts. Yet, as
Inda and Rosaldo elaborate, cultural imperialist understandings of globalisation largely
reduce the phenomenon to two central affects: the first focusing upon ‘the ability of
transnational capital, most often seen as American-dominated and mass-mediated, to
distribute cultural goods around the globe’,83 and the second, attributing the perceived
‘synchronisation of the world to the spread of Western culture more generally’.84
The simplification of affect and vocalisation of others’ experiences reduces the
understanding of the complexity and variability of experiences. In their art, Ross
Mawdsley, ®™ark and The Yes Men voice concerns on behalf of culturally, eco-
nomically and sexually subjugated others, without actively letting them speak. Their
approach to globalisation is at times didactic and culturally imperialistic. Their ex-
pressions, while aesthetically captivating, show a limited understanding of affect.
As Geert Lovink contends, in many early works, active criticism was often replaced
with ‘the faint hope that if a campaign generates enough velocity and resonates with
enough people, it might just take on some of the qualities of a movement’.85 The art
of Ross Mawdsley, ®™ark, and The Yes Men arguably lacks the levels of nuance re-
quired to offer an analytical account of globalisation, relying too heavily upon shock
tactics and striking aesthetics. Lovink claims that this style is inconsistent with the
methods of traditional activists for whom ‘the equation is simple: discourse plus art
79 Ulf Hannerz, ‘Notes on the Global Ecumene’, p. 38.
80 Peter Brooker, (Ed.), Modernism/Postmodernism, p. 24.
81 Jonathon Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, (Eds.), The Anthropology of Globalization, p. 13.
82 Jonathon Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, (Eds.), The Anthropology of Globalization, p. 13.
83 Jonathon Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, (Eds.), The Anthropology of Globalization, p. 13.
84 Jonathon Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, (Eds.), The Anthropology of Globalization, p. 14.
85 Geert Lovink, Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press,
2002, p. 257.
72 4 Digital Art and Political Revolt
equals a spectacle’.86 He observes however, that in more critical forms of art activ-
ism, artists ‘insist on a distinction between real action and the merely symbolic’.87
Arjun Appadurai claims that globalisation is not simply a battleground between
‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, nor is it just another term for cultural homogenisation.
Through arguing that discourses must not be reduced to ‘simple models of push and
pull (in terms of migration theory) or of surpluses and deficits (as in traditional models
of balance and trade)’,88 Appadurai challenges the tendency to regard ‘the dominant’
and ‘the subjugated’, or ‘the West’ and ‘the rest’ as discrete concepts. Pierre Bourdieu
also offers a far more active position, by contesting the assumption that ‘the other’ is
powerless in critiquing change or that ‘economic forces cannot be resisted’.89 Like
Appadurai, Bourdieu contests singular assumptions about globalisation that produce
simplistic understandings of affect and the experiences of the ‘other’.
Conclusion
Ross Mawdsley, ®™ark and The Yes Men show how digital art is uniquely placed
to converse with globalisation—as a phenomenon that has enabled its development
and distribution. Their works show the marks of both globalisation and digitisation,
and test the relationship between the two phenomena. From engaging with advertis-
ing on the Internet, to globally sourcing funds to make their works, crowd-sourcing
content and seeking global collaborators, these artists also rely upon globalisation’s
flows of finance, people, media, information, ideas and technology to make their
art and communicate their revolt. They do not, however, critically reflect upon this
tension in their works. Equally, the at times didactic reduction of globalisation and
digitisation may be partly attributed to their moments of production: the early to
mid-1990s. The era was characterised by alarmist accounts of globalisation and the
deterministic embrace of digital technology as ‘new media’.
As Geert Lovink’s argues, ‘the current political and social conflicts are way too
fluid to be dealt with in such one-dimensional models like propaganda, ‘publicity’,
or ‘edutainment’.90 In other words, a complex topic such as globalisation requires
a polymorphic understanding of the different influences at play. As explored in the
following chapter, by the late 1990s many artists were beginning to see that glo-
balisation’s affects were far too complex to be addressed in uncritical ways. As
discussed in relation to iCinema’s installation T_Visionarium II and Marnix de Nijs’
Beijing Accelerator, digital artists sought to generate more complex user responses
to globalisation, through interactive, haptic and responsive technologies emulated
its spatial, temporal and kinetic impacts.
86 Geert Lovink, Dark Fiber, p. 257.
87 Geert Lovink, Dark Fiber, p. 257.
88 Ulf Hannerz, ‘Notes on the Global Ecumene’, p. 40.
89 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Myth of Globalization’, p. 31.
90 Geert Lovink, Dark Fiber, p. 261.
73
Chapter 5
Global Space, Time and Speed: T_Visionarium II
and Beijing Accelerator
M. Langdon, The Work of Art in a Digital Age: Art, Technology and Globalisation,
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4939-1270-4_5, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Introduction
Following on from the previous chapter that explored radical 1990s art works, this
chapter considers two digital installations from the new millennium: iCinema’s
T_Visionarium II and Marnix de Nijs’ Beijing Accelerator. Both works use dy-
namic technologies to offer more particular understandings of globalisation’s spa-
tial, temporal and kinetic affects. The roles that interactive, haptic and responsive
technologies can play in triggering personal and affective responses are examined
(Fig. 5.1).
The Construction of T_Visionarium II
T_Visionarium II is a live digital environment set within a 9 × 12 m inflatable dome.
The 2008 installation features a Graphical User Interface (GUI), composed of a
touch screen, headset, projector, and surround audiovisual system. Users enter key-
words such as ‘environment’, ‘media’ or ‘warfare’ into a keypad, generating mon-
tages of live and archived news footage from around the world. A motorised tilt/
pan mechanism enables the projector to beam the imagery across the surface of the
dome. The installation integrates old footage with new, blurring senses of present
and past, local and global, and the real and hyperreal. The news stories are sourced
from diverse channels including the politically conservative North American news
station CNN to the more liberal Arabic network Al-Jazeera. As a responsive work,
T_Visionarium II reacts to bodily movements and lines of gaze. If a user looks at
a segment for a length of time, the image increases in size until it dominates the
dome. The sound levels also rise, which intensifies the affects. T_Visionarium II
challenges the binary of ‘the West and the rest’ present in earlier works, by enabling
local and global stories to collide and intersect.
T_Visionarium II was developed in 2001, the same year that the iCinema Centre
for Interactive Cinema Research was launched. Based at The University of New
South Wales, the research centre was collaboratively formed between the School of
74 5 Global Space, Time and Speed: T_Visionarium II and Beijing Accelerator
Computer Science and Engineering and the College of Fine Arts. With a council of
artists and academics including Jeffrey Shaw, Neil Brown, Dennis Del Favero, and
Peter Weibel, iCinema reflects a critical approach to digital art, which locates prac-
tice in terms of discourses. The centre’s early projects and research interests shaped
the development of T_Visionarium II. In 2000, for example, Jeffrey Shaw worked
with Bernd Lintermann and Volker Kuchelmeister to create Placeworld, an adapt-
able multiple user installation that enabled individuals to interact across space. The
use of a dynamic video projection system or ‘panoramic navigator’ (PN), locates
Placeworld as a precursor to T_Visionarium II.
In making this installation, the artists saw that
[w]hile the past implementation of the PN used the real environment as its frame of refer-
ence for interactive information delivery, this technology could also be an ideal interface to
explore and interact with wholly virtual environments.1
In making Placeworld, the artists wanted to create a PN that would intersect with
the touch screen.2 As T_Visionarium II demonstrates, their solution was to ‘connect
a video projector to the PN, and install a circular projection screen’.3
As a product of academic research, T_Visionarium II reflects a different ap-
proach to some of the other artworks discussed in this text. It converses with theo-
ries of distributed aesthetics, digital media and affect, following on from studies
conducted at the iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research, The University
of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia, ZKM Institute for Visual Media (ZKM),
Karlsruhe Germany and EPIDEMIC in Paris. A fibre-optic communications link
enabled international participants to collaborate on this globally produced work,
1 Neil Brown, Dennis Del Favero, Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel, ‘Placeworld’, iCinema, <http://
www.icinema.unsw.edu.au/projects/prj_placeworld.html>, 2007, (accessed 17 December 2007).
This link is no longer active.
2 Neil Brown et. al, ‘Placeworld’, <http://www.icinema.unsw.edu.au/projects/prj_placeworld.
html>.
3 Neil Brown et. al, ‘Placeworld’, <http://www.icinema.unsw.edu.au/projects/prj_placeworld.
html>.
Fig. 5.1 Neil Brown, Dennis
Del Favero, Jeffrey Shaw and
Peter Weibel, T_Visionarium
II, 2008. (Sara Kolster, ‘T_
Visionarium II’, http://sarako.
net/work/tvisionarium-cen-
tury-of-the-city/)
The User Turned Artist 75
defying the traditional art ideals of originality, authenticity and individual author-
ship that traditionally defined art. This project would not have been possible with-
out digital communications. As iCinema’s use of the technology iC_Link reveals,
digital programs and networks are facilitating unprecedented levels of global col-
laboration. By employing artists, programmers, developers, and theoreticians in the
project, the work also unites the fields of art and science, traditionally separated into
subjective/objective and rational/abstract dichotomies. The group’s engagement
with critical discourse is also reminiscent of Frankfurt School works, which sought
to unite theory and practice. As a globally produced work, iCinema might force a
reconsideration of what art might be in an age of digitisation.
The User Turned Artist
In his text The Language of New Media4 Manovich downplays convergences be-
tween past and present, old media and new. Equally, his relegation of message and
media to separate fields is not only structurally reductive, but limiting as an account
of digitisation’s possibilities. If governed by its ‘message’, a digital work simply be-
comes discourse. If perceived purely as a technological object, it is simply ‘media’.
Yet, one of the elements what makes T_Visionarium II ‘understandable’ as a work of
art is its original re-orientation of medium and message. Equally, its critical engage-
ment with its moment of production resonates with Frankfurt School expressions.
By engaging with earlier practices such as Modern montage and cinema, T_Vision-
arium II raises critical questions about the nature of art production in a digital age.
Pierre Bourdieu observes how new forms of art often converse with precedent
styles. He posits that
[w]hen a new literary or artistic group makes its presence felt in the field of literary or
artistic production, the whole problem is transformed, since its coming into being, i.e. into
difference, modifies and displaces the universe of possible options.5
However, what is novel about T_Visionarium II as a digital work is that it does
not ‘displace’ cinema. While Technological Deterministic expressions may render
earlier formats and expression as outmoded, iCinema embraces modern cinema’s
visual and narrative elements, integrating them into their digital work in a continu-
ous rather than disjunctive way.
In terming their collective iCinema, the group recognises and forges links be-
tween analogue and digitally interactive cinematic forms. Their use of projection,
surround sound, montage and cinematic editing is distinctly cinematic. T_Vision-
arium II’s non-linear narrative resonates with the films of Dali, Lang, Antonioni
4 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media.
5 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Field of Cultural Production’, in Anthony Giddens (Ed.) The Polity Reader
in Cultural Theory, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1994, p. 53.
76 5 Global Space, Time and Speed: T_Visionarium II and Beijing Accelerator
and Lynch’s films, which challenge the formal principles of narrative order. Within
these works, chaotic and disjunctive narratives make meaning contingent upon in-
dividual viewers’ senses of space, time and context. In dialogue with Deleuze, iCin-
ema collaborator Dennis Del Favero argues that ‘even in conventional cinema the
beholder’s direct awareness of unfolding events is complicit in bringing narrative
to closure’.6 To this end, the user may be construed as an artistic collaborator—a
notion that challenges the dichotomy between artist and spectator.
While T_Visionarium II features cinematic elements, its interactive and respon-
sive technologies enable it to go beyond. iCinema’s provision of a multi-temporal,
‘recombinatory’ narrative provides heightened opportunities for user interaction
and engagement. The experience of T_Visionarium II also differs from that of going
to the cinema or theatre. The VR headset physically connects the user to the work,
while the GUI directly response to user interactions. Unlike conventional cinema—
which is directed at mass audiences—T_Visionarium II engages with individual
users at the bodily level. The user’s literal connection to the art defies the limits of
physically detached spectatorship. In making T_Visionarium II, iCinema engaged
with a principle of transcriptive narrative, sympathetic to the Duchampian idea that
‘the artist begins the artwork and the witness completes it’.7 When understood in
this way, T_Visionarium II might become what Gene Youngblood terms ‘an exten-
sion of the cinematic enterprise’,8 enabling users to determine narrative outcomes,
‘as they branch through a relatively open-ended cinematic space in ways made pos-
sible, but not directly determined, by the author of that space.’9
iCinema disrupts the modern principle of ‘spectatorship’ through transforming
the physically detached observer into a corporeally active user. Interactive, multi-
sensory and responsive technologies—such as the PN and search engine—enable
users to influence the direction of the artwork’s narrative, resolving iCinema’s ques-
tion of ‘how to conceptualize and develop Internet interfaces which maximize the
seamless integration of interface design and user input.’10 iCinema argues that such
a level of responsiveness would be particularly useful in exploring the realm of digi-
tal affect. While writers like Jay Bolter observe that the ‘mouse and the pen-based
interface allow the user the immediacy of touching, dragging, and manipulating
visually attractive ideograms’,11 with those interactions rendering the ‘computer
interface ‘natural’ rather than arbitrary’,12 these claims can be contested. By involv-
ing users in the artwork’s audiovisual evolution, T_Visionarium II defies the formal
severance of artist and spectator.
6 Dennis Del Favero, ‘Digitally Expanded Forms of Cinematic Narration’, p. 3.
7 Gene Youngblood, ‘A Medium Matures: Video and Cinematic Enterprise’, p. 47.
8 Gene Youngblood, ‘A Medium Matures: Video and Cinematic Enterprise’, p. 47.
9 Gene Youngblood, ‘A Medium Matures: Video and Cinematic Enterprise’, p. 47.
10 Neil Brown et al., ‘Interactive Narrative as a Multi-Temporal Agency’, Future Cinema, Cam-
bridge Mass., MIT Press, p. 312.
11 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, ‘Immediacy, Hypermediacy and Remediation’, p. 23.
12 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, ‘Immediacy, Hypermediacy and Remediation’, p. 23.
The User Turned Artist 77
Del Favero states that much has been written about the ‘death’ of cinematic nar-
rative, however ‘limited attention has been given to its powerful persistence, albeit
in new and emergent forms’.13 While interactive digital art may draw upon cin-
ematic conventions, principles of immersion and real-time responsiveness enable it
to go beyond. As Blais and Ippolito contend,
[f]ar from the traditional epicentres of artistic production and distribution, creative people
sitting at computer keyboards are tearing apart and rebuilding society’s vision of itself.
Though they may call themselves scientists, activists, or entrepreneurs rather than poets or
artists, many of these visionaries are playing the roles of Dante or da Vinci.14
iCinema’s creative enterprise seems to reflect Youngblood’s claim that digital art
can resonate with Post-structuralist cinema, as a practice negotiating
two traditions previously regarded as incompatible—first, the cinematic tradition (includ-
ing surrealist and mythopoetic traditions of avant-garde personal cinema, whether actor/
dialog based or purely formalistic) with its emphasis on illusion, spectacle, and external
reference through metaphoric or allegorical narrative; and secondly, the post-modernist tra-
dition in the fine arts, characterized by minimalism, self-reference, and a rigorous, didactic
investigation of the structures and materials of the medium. 15
The installation’s integration and investigation of these traditions, connects with
Foucault’s idea of a ‘field of strategic possibilities’16 or disjunctions, which define
the work of art. While Anna Munster questions digital artists need to ‘avow the
necessity of this historical gesture, the basis of which amounts to a requirement of
thinking new media in relation to old media’,17 the severance of art and digital me-
dia from historical discourses and forms creates a problematic distance, which not
only distances digital expressions from the realm of art, but implies there is nothing
about ‘new media’ that resonates with the old.
In conceiving T_Visionarium II, iCinema felt that ‘[o]nly within the technical
possibilities afforded by digital technology can the beholder, retaining their role
as beholder, assert autonomy over the temporal direction of the narrative.’18 While
many aspects of the installation are user directed, iCinema still directs key ele-
ments. In recording participants’ ‘private’ encounters, for example, the artists’ retain
some level of control over their experience. iCinema’s choice of archival footage
and subscription to certain news channels also means that they have some influence
over the searchable content. There is also an expectation about how the user will
behave within the installation. It is assumed that they will walk into the dome, don
the VR headset and interact with the GUI. If the subject simply entered the space,
stood still and watched the narrative unfold, they would thwart iCinema’s intentions
by becoming a physically detached spectator instead of an active user. The artists
13 Dennis Del Favero, ‘Expanded Cinematic Forms of Narration, p. 1.
14 Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito, At the Edge of Art, p. 7.
15 Gene Youngblood, ‘A Medium Matures’, p. 48.
16 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Field of Cultural Production’, p. 53.
17 Anna Munster, ‘New Media as Old Media’, p. 22.
18 Dennis Del Favero, ‘Expanded Cinematic Forms of Narration’, p. 3.
78 5 Global Space, Time and Speed: T_Visionarium II and Beijing Accelerator
also assume that the user will have some digital literacy and proficiency, to enable
them to conduct meaningful searches and physically respond to the interface.
Spatial, Temporal and Kinetic Flow
Jeffrey Shaw—one of the founders of iCinema—writes that one of iCinema’s key
objectives was to create a spatially distributed and multi-temporal environment that
not only generated but also captured the affects on film. As discussed in their es-
say ‘Interactive Narrative as a Multi-Temporal Agency’, the collaboration wanted
to address what they saw to be the limited understandings of multi-modal time
systems.19 By creating seamless spatial and temporal flows, Neil Brown claims that
iCinema’s recombinatory software provides ‘multiple entry and exit points to the
information’.20
The concept of organism shapes the narrative of T_Visionarium II. The work’s
recombinatory narratives montages and search functions emulate non-linear streams
of memory, information processing and conceptualisation. According to iCinema,
the installation provides an ‘aesthetic transcription’,21 which challenges traditional
principles of cinematic duration, authorship and creative control. Manuel An under-
standing of organism informs the construction of T_Visionarium II, as a work that
physically embeds the user within the work. By connecting the individual to the
dome’s multi-sensory environment, the artists converse with De Landa’s theory that
‘structures as different as rock, animal species, and social classes may be viewed
as historical products of the same structure-generating process’,22 for they share
moments in time and influence each other. This notion can be applied to digitisa-
tion and globalisation, as historically entwined phenomena. De Landa’s integration
of human and non-human structures can be used to contextualise iCinema’s use of
‘hard’ technologies to facilitate ‘soft’ and affective experiences. T_Visionarium II
shows how digital art can generate sensory, intimate and particular encounters of
otherwise inaccessible and universal subjects such like globalisation.
The dissolution of borders manifests in the artists’ presentation of globalisation
as a fluid and ‘felt’ phenomenon that is simultaneously public and private, local
and global, past and present, simulated and real. This fraying of borders converses
with Andreas Huyssen’s notion of art underscored by an ‘evolving dissolution, of
aesthetic entropy, a reciprocal emptying out of traditions, a loss of form and truth
content’.23 Flexible dialogues on globalisation parallel new approaches to digital
media, which oppose the idea that digital technology only produces positive (or
negative) affects. In their rejection of Technological Determinism and the reductive
approaches of earlier digital artists discussed in the previous chapter, iCinema cre-
19 Neil Brown et al., ‘Interactive Narrative as a Multi-Temporal Agency’, p. 4.
20 Neil Brown et al., ‘Interactive Narrative as a Multi-Temporal Agency’, p. 312.
21 Neil Brown et al., ‘Interactive Narrative as a Multi-Temporal Agency’, p. 1.
22 Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, p. 271.
23 Andreas Huyssen, ‘Back to the Future’, p. 149.
Spatial, Temporal and Kinetic Flow 79
ate spaces ‘in between’ binaries, opposing accounts that render digital technology as
either: controlled or democratic, ordered or manoeuvrable, hostile or tactile, static
or transcendent. The artists suggest that Structuralist discourses derived from lin-
guistics and sociology, might limit the range of experiences that digital works like
T_Visionarium II generate.
T_Visionarium II’s contradictory fragmentations and integrations invoke The-
odor Adorno’s concept of ‘Verfransung der Kunste’,24 discussed in Chapter Two.
Adorno’s ‘fraying of borders’ manifests in the projection of thematically similar and
different images from both near and far contexts. Dynamic constructions of globali-
sation and digitisation are also evident in the writings of Arjun Appadurai and Gilles
Deleuze, as previously discussed. While T_Visionarium II’s content might seem
chaotic, it also displays strong structural elements as exemplified by the artists’ de-
liberate selection of footage, choice of news stations, and the technical architecture
of the work. To this end, the artists explore iterations between flux and astaticism,
autonomy and loss of control, physicality and virtuality.
iCinema’s installation questions what is real and simulated, through challenging
the rootedness of place, regulation of time, calculation of speed and coordination
of space. It disrupts users’ senses of space and time through the fusion of archived
and real-time news images with local and international footage. The installation’s
‘recombination’ of content provides new way of thinking about globalisation as
simultaneously local and global, rather than one construct or the other. The satura-
tion of sound and imagery within T_Visionarium II emulates the constant flow of
information in a global-digital age, and the idea that time is perpetual and space
boundary-less. In this way, the work mimics the experience of trawling the Internet
or traversing the globe: in an age where global flows of transport, communica-
tions, media and ideas have sped up. The kaleidoscope of images drags the user
through social, historical and geographical contexts, rupturing our senses of place
and reality.
The projection of television images across the surface of the dome also points
to the ubiquitous presence of the mass media in a global age. T_Visionarium II’s
hardware enables the user to search ‘through every shot in the last 24 hours to
find just those that had fast camera movement, loud noises or both and then hav-
ing the capacity to combine them in fresh ways.’25 According to Keir Smith, this
kind of art offers ‘an alternative, active and potentially creative engagement with
a familiar data set, one which may lead to new, unexpected and, often unintended
synchroneities.’26 The user might contemplate their responses to news stories, and
24 Andreas Huyssen, ‘Back to the Future’, p. 150.
25 Keir Smith, ‘Rewarding the Viuser: A Human-Televisual Data Interface Application’, iCinema,
<http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:s3oXhII19jUJ:www.icinema.unsw.edu.au/pdf/reward-
ing_viuser.pdf+Keir+Smith+’Rewarding+the+Viuser:+A+Human-Televisual+Data+Interface+A
pplication’&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=au>, 2003, (accessed 01 January 2005). This link is no
longer active.
26 Keir Smith, ‘Rewarding the Viuser’, <http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:s3oXhII19jUJ:www.
icinema.unsw.edu.au/pdf/rewarding_viuser.pdf+Keir+Smith+’Rewarding+the+Viuser:+A+Hum
an-Televisual+Data+Interface+Application’&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=au>.
80 5 Global Space, Time and Speed: T_Visionarium II and Beijing Accelerator
consider whether knowing their geographical contexts impact upon their affective
responses.
Globalisation and Affective Experience
Through responsive and recombinatory technology, T_Visionarium II presents glo-
balisation as a series of individually felt affects. The sequences emulate individual
‘recombinations’ of current events or the news with ‘archived’ memories and en-
counters. The movements and iterations of the user’s cognitive processes add un-
chartered elements to the mix. T_Visionarium II’s narrative, in that sense, might be
viewed as an iterative construct that oscillates between the artists’ intention and the
audience’s response. The process of selecting information from the global media—
and subjectively responding to—may be seen to mimic this process.
Through locating the user at the centre of its ‘globe’, iCinema presents the rela-
tionship between the individual and these phenomena as one of mutual affect. While
agency may be circumscribed, the individual always retains the power of choice. In
the case of this installation, this may be to disengage with, thwart or exit the work.
The installation’s juxtapositions articulate globalisation as a dynamic, contradic-
tory, and relative phenomenon. To view it as the sum of their affects is to privilege
a relational approach centred upon the changeability of contexts, the indeterminacy
of human cognition, and variances of subjective response. iCinema’s negotiation of
objectivity and subjectivity in relation to global news, imagery and ideology, sug-
gests the fallacy of empirical accounts centred upon what globalisation is or is not.
T_Visionarium II creates a dialogue between globalisation and digitisation as con-
temporaneous phenomena. In contrast to some of the alarmist accounts of globalisa-
tion and digitisation that pervaded 1990s art, iCinema shows both phenomena to be
complex, often generating contradictory spatial, temporal and kinetic impacts. T_Vi-
sionarium II shows how digital art can disrupt the binaries of local and global, uni-
versal and particular, objective and subjective, and artist and spectator. In challeng-
ing reductive accounts, it shows human experience to be unclassifiable—a dynamic
construct and the product of iterations between memory, interpretation and affect.
Beijing Accelerator
In a similar way to iCinema’s T_Visionarium II, Marnix de Nijs’ uses responsive
and cinematic media to explore individual responses to globalisation in his 2006
installation Beijing Accelerator. Based in the Netherlands, de Nijs’ art encourages
contemplation of the relationships between bodies and digital technology. He has
exhibited his works at festivals and exhibitions around the world. De Nijs’ Beijing
Accelerator explores notions of freedom and alienation, diaspora and dislocation.
The installation shows how digital art can function as a unique mode of expression,
through physically emulating some of globalisation’s spatial, temporal and kinetic
Beijing Accelerator 81
impacts. The work directly engages with the individual, transforming them from a
physically detached spectator into a corporeally engaged user (Fig. 5.2).
Beijing Accelerator facilitates micro responses to globalisation’s macro changes.
It converses with Marc Hansen’s notion that through ‘placing the embodied viewer-
participant into a circuit with information, the installations and environments they
create function as laboratories for the conversion of information into corporeally
apprehensible images.’27 To this end, what an interactive and responsive work like
Beijing Accelerator generates ‘is less a framed object than an embodied, subjective
experience that can only be felt.’28 This affective account of globalisation counters
impersonal and systemic analyses, centred upon political or economic impacts. In
this way, it connects with iCinema’s T_Visionarium II.
Beijing Accelerator tests the limits of physical endurance and survival, in a
world of high-speed technology and media saturation. In reflecting upon this real-
ity, de Nijs claims that ‘[t]echnology must literally merge, become absorbed into the
body so that it becomes a co-determiner of perception.’29 The installation features
a racing car chair, which is fixed to a motorised frame.30 The frame is controlled
by a joystick and spins at different speeds in clockwise and anti-clockwise direc-
tions. A 160 × 120 cm screen is fixed to the frame. The user’s objective is to align a
square icon on the screen with a magnified image. This is a difficult task given the
chair’s momentum. It can, however, be achieved if the speed of the chair and flow
of images are brought into line. However, a new panorama is soon displayed, which
moves at a more rapid speed. There are 6 levels for the user to complete.
In commenting upon Beijing Accelerator, Marian Van Mourik claims that it
‘clearly belongs to the recreation ground.’31 Like his installation Run Motherfucker
Run (2004) discussed in Chapter Seven, Beijing Accelerator has game-like ele-
ments. Both installations engage with the body: they draw subjects in and test their
physical limits. The sensory experiences generated are reminiscent of early VR
arcade games, featuring surround sound and evolving narratives that relied upon
movement and interaction. Yet, within both works, it is difficult for the user to gain
control over the narrative and ‘win’. Their rapid movements can make users feel
nauseated or disoriented, forcing their resignation.
Beijing Accelerator builds upon senses of urban tempo and technological
change, evident in Run Motherfucker Run. The latter installation presented a dark
and threatening cityscape. The images changed in size and saturation in response to
the user’s interaction with the treadmill. Like Run Motherfucker Run, Beijing Accel-
erator presents an ominous urban landscape. The installation was created after the
artist’s visit to Beijing and ‘realization of how quickly the dynamics of a city could
27 Mark B.N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, p. 11.
28 Mark B.N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, p. 14.
29 Marnix De Nijs, Marnix De Nijs Website, <http://www.marnixdenijs.nl/>, (accessed 30 Sep-
tember 2010).
30 Marnix De Nijs, Marnix De Nijs Website, <http://www.marnixdenijs.nl/>.
31 Marian Van Mourik, ‘Beijing Accelerator’, Rhizome, 27 June 2006, <http://rhizome.org/edito-
rial/archive/2006/jun/?page=18>, 2006, (accessed 4 April 2013). This link is no longer active.
82 5 Global Space, Time and Speed: T_Visionarium II and Beijing Accelerator
transform into such apparent modernism’.32 De Nijs observed key changes, such as
the spread of advertising media and dizzying tempo of life (Fig. 5.3).
After visiting Beijing, de Nijs noted that globalisation’s temporal and kinetic
flows were influencing human behaviours, by leading to ‘such things as speed dating
(for our love lives), power naps (for our health and exercise), quality time (for be-
ing with the family) and fast food (for staving off hunger).’33 The artist claimed that
‘this desire to control and optimise every aspect of our lives is matched by a nagging
feeling that we never have enough time.’34In reflecting upon these changes, he notes
that ‘[o]ne of the characteristics of a technological culture is that change is constant.
Everyone who wants to keep pace is continually required to adjust; which does not
happen automatically and can, in time lead to cultural-pathological anomalies.’35
Like iCinema, the artist locates technological change in historical terms, noting that
‘travellers had to get used to the first trains and aeroplanes. The introduction of such
travel technology initially led to disorientation and required a new outlook.’36
Beijing Accelerator was featured in Strozzina Gallery’s exhibition As Soon
as Possible: Acceleration in Contemporary Society (Florence, 14 May—18 July
2010). The exhibition explored the influences of high-speed media and connective
technologies upon urban lives.37 Some of the artworks showed how professional
demands had become so great, that workers were left feeling physically unable to
keep up. As the curators observed, the perceived intensification of time and speed
were leading to ‘widespread anxiety and depression which are frequent indicators
32 Marnix De Nijs, Marnix De Nijs Website, <http://www.marnixdenijs.nl/>.
33 No author, Strozzina Gallery Website, <www.strozzina.org/asap/e_index.php>, (accessed 30
September 2010).
34 No author, Strozzina Gallery Website, <www.strozzina.org/asap/e_index.php>.
35 Marnix De Nijs, Marnix De Nijs Website, <http://www.marnixdenijs.nl/>.
36 Marnix De Nijs, Marnix De Nijs Website, <http://www.marnixdenijs.nl/>.
37 No author, Strozzina Gallery Website, <www.strozzina.org/asap/e_index.php>.
Fig. 5.2 Marnix de Nijs,
Beijing Accelerator, 2006.
(Image courtesy of the artist).
Beijing Accelerator 83
of the malaise of people living on the edge of their own potential in a high-speed
world.’38 This is a strong theme within de Nijs’ art.
In his astatements, de Nijs’ has also expressed concern about our degraded en-
vironment, which is unable to meet human demands. Through its physical simula-
tion of lives ‘sped up’ Beijing Accelerator encourages the critique of a perceived
new speed of existence. It shows how globalisation’s spatial, temporal and kinetic
changes are negatively impacting upon urban life, in leading to feelings of cultural
dislocation, social alienation, or even physically illness if the user’s body succumbs
to the work’s dizzying effects. Beijing Accelerator shows how increased flows of
finance, information and technology are heightening urban tempos and generating
time-poor ‘wage slaves’.
This sense connects with Paul Virilio’s observations about the negative impacts
of global media and technology upon urban life. As interpreted by Rob Bartram,
‘Virilio has long argued that dromology, time compression and visualizing technol-
ogy are closely linked concepts that together have created a new ocular reality’.39
Bartram builds upon Virilio’s thesis by positing ‘that a new ocular centrism has
emerged in the last ten years that has reconfigured the way in which we view [the]
world and dramatically changed the way in which we participate in it’.40 There is
a strong sense of ‘dromocracy’ or as Virilio terms, ‘the dictatorship of speed gov-
erned by the principle that “if time is money, speed is power”’.41 These tensions are
strongly evident in de Nijs’ art.
Beijing Accelerator raises concerns about globalisation’s spatial, temporal and
technological impacts of upon bodies and consciousnesses. It converses with alarm-
ist critiques globalisation, centred upon senses of alienation and disconnection.
38 No author, Strozzina Gallery Website, <www.strozzina.org/asap/e_index.php>.
39 Rob Bartram, ‘Visuality, Dromology and Time Compression: Paul Virilio’s New Ocularcen-
trism, Time & Society, September 2004 vol. 13, no. 2–3, pp. 286.
40 Rob Bartram, ‘Visuality, Dromology and Time Compression’.
41 No author, Strozzina Gallery Website, <www.strozzina.org/asap/e_index.php>.
Fig. 5.3 Marnix de Nijs,
Beijing Accelerator, 2006.
(Image courtesy of the artist).
84 5 Global Space, Time and Speed: T_Visionarium II and Beijing Accelerator
While in many ways this is reductive, Beijing Accelerator does show individual
perception pertains not only to how ‘not external stimuli are interpreted by the five
senses, but also the feelings that come from within the body itself, the informa-
tion that is derived from one’s own muscles and nerves (the technical term being
proprioception).’42 De Nijs’ work encourages instinctual responses, in generating
primordial feelings such as apprehension, alarm and fear. Beijing Accelerator pro-
vides understanding of the global city, as a familiar yet radically accelerated space.
While many elements of the installation are artist directed, its ‘recombinatory’ nar-
rative framework—to borrow the term from iCinema—encourages unique encoun-
ters of globalisation. The user as ‘beholder’ directs the narrative revelation through
their physical movements and choices. In promoting particular and affective experi-
ences, Beijing Accelerator emphasises the arbitrariness of affect and the overlapping
of binary constructs such as the real and the simulated, the physical and virtual. How-
ever, it does not go as far as T_Visionarium II, which challenges either-or accounts of
globalisation through emphasising the fluid interchanges of memory and encounter,
as well differential human response. iCinema’s art also blurs the constructs of past
and present, local and global, cultural nearness and distance. By creating new spaces
‘in between’, it points to the fallacy of alarmist accounts such as de Nijs’, which seem
to assume that all experiences of globalisation are negative or potentially injurious.
Conclusion
As with all art, it is possible that users of T_Visionarium II and Beijing Accelerator
will not respond as the artists intended. Both works feature game-like interfaces,
and incorporate cinematic principles of projection, surround sound and immersion.
It seems that the artists’ intentions are for individuals to experience emulations of
globalisation, including the ‘speeding’ up of time, compression of space and satura-
tion of images. Yet, these messages could be lost if users chose to only experience
the works’ playful elements. As the blogger ‘Nova’ writes, Beijing Accelerator is ‘[g]
iddy, disorienting and fun, it’s tempting to ignore what the artist intends and just spin
as fast as possible while trying not to fall off.’43 As argued in Chapter Two, this points
to the importance of form and function in the understanding of digital art. With these
understandings in mind, the next chapter considers how global cities can provide new
ways of thinking about globalisation, with reference to the exhibition Metropolis.
42 Marnix De Nijs, Marnix De Nijs Website, <http://www.marnixdenijs.nl/>.
43 Nova, ‘Sona8’, TagR.tv, <http://tagr.tv/tag/beijing-accelerator/>, 2008, (accessed 4 April 2013).
85
Chapter 6
Metropolis: Imagining The Global City
M. Langdon, The Work of Art in a Digital Age: Art, Technology and Globalisation,
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4939-1270-4_6, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Introduction
This chapter explores the exhibition Metropolis held at the National Gallery of
Victoria’s (NGV) in 2004. It focuses on how interactive and immersive digital
media can re-imagine human life within the global city. The predominantly North
American cinematic works range from animation to documentary. All are connected
by the central question of what is the nature of existence within the global city?
They show lives punctuated by the need to connect, questions of cultural identity,
global economies, terrorism and the remembrance of home. Each artwork presents
a different vision of the global city, shaped by heightened flows of people, media,
finance, ideas and technologies.
The nine works discussed are: Shoba’s Blowing Zen (2003), Nicholas Gole-
biewski’s This is Where I Live (2003), Tom Otterness’ Nine Eleven (2003), Cristian
Alexa’s 10-Second Couples (2000), Abbey Williams’ YES (2002), Andy Diaz Hope
Financial District Infiltration: Everybody is Somebody’s Terrorist (2004), PHAT’s
Harlem: The Ghetto Fabulous (2004), Beat Streuli’s Pallasades 05-01-01 (2001)
and Brian Alfred’s Overload (2004). Each artwork presents a different vision of
the global city, shaped by heightened flows of people, media, finance, ideas and
technologies (Fig. 6.1).
The films selected by curators Anonda Bell and Kelly Gellatly use different tech-
niques to present individual articulations of life in the global city. Many of the
works challenge formal constructions of art, conversing with Walter Benjamin’s
sense that
[a]s it became more feasible to reproduce works of art (by mechanical means) and to
arrange for exhibits (through improved communication and more efficient travel), art lost
its ritual aura and became a political commodity.1
In as much as they are cinematic works, the Metropolis films are performance pieces,
literary narratives, soundscapes and memoirs, which share social and political mes-
sages about life in a global era. As these expressions reveal, digital art can provide a
unique platforms for the intimate contemplation of globalisation’s impacts.
1 Laurie Schneider Adams, The Methodologies of Art, p. 63.
86 6 Metropolis: Imagining The Global City
The Metropolis artists use digital technology to emulate and articulate ur-
ban shifts. Some of the artworks—like Nicholas Golebiewski’s This is Where I
Live—suggest that globalisation creates new spaces ‘in between’. With the rise
of ‘glocalisation’, city dwellers can feel simultaneously globalised and localised.
This contradiction is evident in Andy Diaz Hope’s, Financial District Infiltra-
tion: Everybody is Somebody’s Terrorist, which creates inter-spaces in its negotia-
tion of the local/global, past/present, and real/simulated. In this way, some of the
Metropolis works mirror iCinema’s more flexible approaches to globalisation, as
explored in the previous chapter.
Constructing the City
The Metropolis films engage with the concept of the global city as a space fun-
damentally defined by heightened flows of technology, people, finance, informa-
tion, and ideas. An awareness of globalisation’s social, political and technological
impacts is evident in many of the works. While similar urban affects have been
documented in earlier periods of time, the scale of influence is unprecedented. As
explored in Chap. 2, Modern industrialization also altered popular senses of urban
space and time. The advent of Modernism shifted perceptions of the metropolis
and the role of citizens. The notion of the flânerie centred on the idea of the citizen
observing the city’s altered landscape. This awareness inspired new thoughts about
urban life in art and literature.
As Lewis Mumford observed, the city was ‘the seat of the temple, the market, the
hall of justice, the academy of learning’.2 Within its streets, ‘human experience is
transformed into viable signs, symbols, patterns of conduct, systems of order’.3 This
2 Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities, New York, Harcourt Brace and Co., 1938, p. 4.
3 Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities, p. 4.
Fig. 6.1 Nicholas Gole-
biewski, This is Where I Live,
2003. (Image courtesy of the
artist)
87Constructing the City
articulation resonates with Stuart Hall’s construction of global cities, as cultural,
political and economic hubs operating as
centres of political power, both national and international, and of the organizations related
to government; centres of national and international trade…centres of banking, insurance,
and related financial services; centres of advanced professional activity of all kinds…cen-
tres of information gathering and diffusion, through publishing and the mass media; centres
of conspicuous consumption, both of luxury goods for the minority and of mass-produced
goods for the multitude; and centres of arts, culture, and entertainment.4
The films discussed in this chapter engage with earlier notions of the city, as well as
present and future possibilities.
As explored in relation to the exhibition Metropolis, analyses centred upon the
dynamics of global cities, provide means for understanding globalisation as a series
of local events and particular affects. This method also offers a different approach to
the systemic construction of globalisation in terms of the broad political responses
or financial manoeuvres of nation states. An approach centred upon the global city,
also avoids the simplicity of ‘backlash accounts’, which focus exclusively on the
actions of corporations or nations states. These understandings can downplay the
autonomy of local services and industries—such as small-scale factories and finan-
cial markets within the city—which are also part of globalisation’s tale. In her text
Cities in a World Economy, Sociology for a New Century, Saskia Sassen argues that
analyses of globalisation centred upon the global city, can add a micro or ‘human’
element to understanding.5
Using the global city as a site of reference, Sassen shifts the emphasis away
from universal to particular contexts. In Cities in a World Economy, she contends
that the inclusion of the city to analyses of globalisation adds three important el-
ements.6 Firstly, it provides more intimate and particular contexts for analysis.
Secondly, it shifts the focus away from top-down examinations centred upon gov-
ernments, corporations and other political-economic power brokers. Lastly, it al-
lows for the exploration of the human ‘microgeographies’ existing within local
spaces.7 Through her analysis of cities, Sassen contests positivist accounts centred
upon universal assumptions. The Metropolis films engage with the cultural flows
of global cities. Nicholas Golebiewski’s film This is Where I Live, for example,
explores the layering of traditions and cultural practices in New York. As cultural
microcosms of globalisation, global cities can offer new ways of accessing this
macro phenomenon.
The global city shares many of the same qualities of the classical metropolis.
In classical antiquity, the city was at the helm of social, political and economic
exchange. While ancient ideas of the metropolis remained, the rise of industrialism
4 Stuart Hall ‘Globalization and the World Cities’, in F-C Lo and Y-M Yeung (Eds.), Globalisation
and the World of Large Cities, Tokyo, United Nations University Press, 1998, p. 17.
5 Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy, Sociology for a New Century, Second Ed., Thousand
Oaks, Pine Forge Press, 2000.
6 Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy.
7 Saskia Sassen, ‘Globalization and the Formation of Claims’.
88 6 Metropolis: Imagining The Global City
in the late nineteenth century transformed the city through increasing human flows,
and strengthening systems of finance, politics, transport and communications. Mo-
dernity brought an eclecticism of class, ethnicity, and political perspective to the
city’s space. As Lewis Mumford discusses, this shift in social landscape inspired
new ideas about humanity, and its potential within the urban realm.8 The creation
of the modern metropolis occurred in historical synchrony with the rise of capital-
ism as a form of economic exchange.9 The rise of capitalism arguably transformed
the city site, centralising production and creating a hierarchy of production and
exchange.
While the global city reflects many of the same functions and features of the
classical metropolis, digitisation heightens many of these flows and contributes to
intensified experiences of globalisation’s impacts. However, globalisation’s im-
pacts can be contradictory. It can lead to new forms of connection—online for ex-
ample—enabling individuals to come together in defiance of geographical borders.
Yet at the same time, globalisation can also heighten senses of alienation, as Nebojš
a Šerić Shoba (Shoba)’s film Blowing Zen explores.
Shoba: Blowing Zen
Shoba moved to New York from Sarajevo in 2002. In Blowing Zen, he offers a
post-apocalyptic vision of New York, which is both recognisable and obscure. Re-
leased in 2003, the film presents Times Square as a metaphor for Western cultures
of consumption. Instead of being packed with consumers, the iconic space has been
emptied of human and vehicular traffic. The only movement within the square is the
flicker of advertising imagery, and continuous cycle of traffic lights moving from
green to red. The sounds of urban hustle are replaced with the Zen-like sounds of
an Oriental flute. With the frenetic flows of space, time and speed diminished, Time
Square might be seen as a contemplative space. Shoba’s re-arrangement is reminis-
cent of Situationist art styles, which used irony to generate emotive responses from
audiences (Fig. 6.2).
Blowing Zen presents New York as a city that privileges materialism over hu-
manism. The empty streets are overlooked by advertising images and corporate lo-
gos. In the wake of its citizens, billboards for global brands such as TDK, Panasonic
and Swatch blink in vain. By removing the consumers that contextualise them, the
advertisements become meaningless images. There is nothing in this urban space
that is culturally defining or unique. The city appears like any other. Its billboards
advertise the same products found everywhere, making New York materially indis-
tinguishable from global cities such as Sydney or Tokyo. With New York emptied of
consumers, Blowing Zen might leave its audience to question: to what extent does
8 For an historical exploration of the city see: Lewis Mumford’s The City in History.
9 Lewis Mumford, The City in History.
89
Shoba: Blowing Zen
consumerism overshadow cultural imperatives? And, what are the elements that
make cities culturally rich and generative spaces?
In Blowing Zen, scrolling stock prices and neon news headlines confirm Jean
Baudrillard’s fear that in a digital age, simulation will come to replace human reali-
ty.10 Shoba’s art engages with his concern that in an era of digitisation,
old distinctions and orientations are abolished: objects no longer relate at all to their pro-
cesses of human production, there is a loss of emotional content and of ‘objective’ or criti-
cal distance.11
The transmission of imagery from 11 September 2001 was extremely rapid—facili-
tated by global news networks and online sharing. Straight after that tragedy, neon
depictions of the U.S. flag and the slogan ‘God Bless America’ flooded advertising
billboards, raising questions about the boundaries between cultural and commercial
space. Blowing Zen conveys the powerful message that despite the influence of
global advertising, finance, technology and media, the city is nothing without its
citizens.
In Blowing Zen, the billboard avatars seem to replace life itself, while the reflec-
tions of the U.S. flag in the mirrored glass of a skyscraper act serve as haunting
reminders of a culture left behind. With the city devoid of its people, the Modern
notion of flânerie is given currency in Blowing Zen. The early Twentieth century
notion of the flâneur was centred upon the idea of urban spectatorship. Within the
film, the concept is reversed with the city left to ‘look back’. The concern that
virtual simulation is negatively impacting upon humanity is a key theme. Shoba’s
art raises the question what happens to a city when it is emptied of its people? This
10 See Baudrillard’s theories of digital simulation in: Jean Baudrillard, ‘From ‘Simulcra and Simu-
lations’.
11 Jean Baudrillard, From ‘Simulcra and Simulations’, p. 22.
Fig. 6.2 Shoba, Blowing Zen,
2003. (http://www.ngv.vic.
gov.au/metropolis/resources/
rb_metropolis.pdf)
90 6 Metropolis: Imagining The Global City
question was raised in the wake of 11 September 2001. It is said that an eerie hush
befell New York, as it was evacuated.
Arguably, Blowing Zen functions as something more than just ‘art for art’s sake’.
It encourages the viewer to question the impacts of globalisation upon the city. In
contemplating Times Square, Shoba described ‘thousands of people are stepping
over your feet, pushing you around. Noise is unbearable, smell of burned meat
from nearby food stands, hundreds of advertising panels decorated by millions of
flashing lights, outbursts of shopping hysteria’.12 In this way, Blowing Zen connects
with Ernst Fischer’s notion introduced in Chap. 2, that art is not just about beautiful
aesthetics—if it’s truthful ‘it must also reflect decay’.13
Nicholas Golebiewski: This is Where I Live
In contrast to Blowing Zen, Nicholas Golebiewski’s 2003 film This is Where I Live
explores some of the private spaces where globalisation manifests. A high level
of intimacy is achieved through first person narration and handheld camera work,
which invite us into the filmmaker’s world. While we never see the narrator, he
directly addresses us as he takes us on a tour of his Brooklyn apartment. A nostalgic
feel is achieved through black and white film, a 1950s voice over style, and depic-
tions of old photographs, souvenirs and artefacts. The narrator’s instructive tone
is reminiscent of early television and radio broadcasts. In this way, Golebiewski
emphasises the roles of individual memories, interpretations and encounters in ar-
ticulations of globalisation (Fig. 6.3).
As explored in Chap. 2, globalisation can elicit different responses, ranging
from senses of spatial nearness to distance, temporal stillness and speed, feelings
of global connection and alienation, or the feeling that the world as known has
changed. These affects can alter our perceptions of cultural constructs such as indi-
viduality, reality, history, culture, community and homeland. The concept of home
features strongly in Golebiewski’s work. Contrary to alarmist accounts by writers
like Naomi Klein, who perceives globalisation as de-territorialising, This is Where I
Live shows how it can humanise and encourage human connections, through high-
lighting the powerful persistance of local rituals, unique traditions, private memo-
ries and subjective interpretations. While Shoba’s work presents alienation and the
triumph of commerce over cultural generation, Golebiewski’s offers an account of
globalisation centred upon personal, localised and culturally divergent responses.
This is Where I Live shows how the global city can provide heightened oppor-
tunities for cultural exchange. The narrator discusses his own eclectic background,
with reference to personal photographs and effects. As curator Anonda Bell sug-
gests, Golebiewski’s art raises questions about cultural identity in a global age, and
12 Anonda Bell, ‘Metropolis Exhibition Brochure’, <http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/metropolis/
resources/rb_metropolis.pdf>, (accessed 10 December 2006). This link is no longer active.
13 Laurie Schneider Adams, The Methodologies of Art, p. 62.
91
Nicholas Golebiewski: This is Where I Live
seems to ask: ‘[a]t which point or in what generation does an individual have the
right to feel they belong to a place with all the responsibility, pressures and plea-
sures that this entitlement may entail?’14 The film asks what it might mean to be a
New Yorker—versus a North American—and creates space for divergent responses.
The existence of cultural precincts—such as Little Italy and Chinatown—high-
lights the complexity of cultural identities in a global age, which are often shaped
by competing influences. This is Where I Live challenges the binary of local/global
through providing a more iterative construction of cultural identity in a time of
globalisation. Through raising issues of ethnic versus national identity, the film sug-
gests that the global city creates new possibilities for us to ‘narrate’ our own cultural
realities.
As previously discussed in this text, Inda and Rosaldo observe that globalisa-
tion’s ‘deterritorialization of culture is invariably the occasion for the reinsertion
of culture in new time-space contexts’.15 Golebiewski ‘re-inserts’ the individual
in the global landscape through revealing its capacity to generate highly personal
and intimate ‘time-space contexts’. Through this process, he counters reductive ac-
counts of globalisation, focused upon universal outcomes and affects. While top-
down analyses may offer macro explanations of globalisation, their grand claims
leave little room for the contrary iterations of individual response. As a more private
expression, This is Where I Live offers a different account of globalisation.
14 Anonda Bell, ‘Metropolis Exhibition Brochure’, <http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/metropolis/re-
sources/rb_metropolis.pdf>.
15 Jonathon Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, (Eds.) The Anthropology of Globalization, p. 11.
Fig. 6.3 Nicholas Golebiewski, This is Where I Live, 2003. (http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/metropo-
lis/resources/rb_metropolis.pdf )
92 6 Metropolis: Imagining The Global City
In conversing with globalisation and its urban impacts, Golebiewski creates con-
trasts between public and private realms. Point of view camera gives the impression
that the narrator is peering down at the street, concealed from view. We share this
vision, and observe the bustling flow of metropolitan life. Within the global city, the
narrator suggests the need for introspective escape, at one point joking that ‘the only
place to go for privacy is an uninteresting art exhibition’.16 The contrasts between
interior and exterior space encourage us to consider internal and intuitive responses
to globalisation.
Montage sequences emulate the layering of the past, present and imagined. Like
iCinema’s T_Visionarium II, This is Where I Live prompts contemplation of how
globalisation can affect constructions of cultures and ourselves. The film provides
an intensely personal expression of life within the frantic city of New York. Like
Blowing Zen, Golebiewski’s presentation of urban calm contrasts with images of
chaos and commotion. Yet, while Shoba offers a de-humanised vision, Golebiews-
ki’s New York is personally and culturally generative.
PHAT: Harlem: The Ghetto Fabulous
PHAT offer a different vision of New York in their 2004 film Harlem: The Ghet-
to Fabulous. The collective, formed of David Mesfin, Nathaniel Belcher, Adam
Wheeler and Stephen Slaughter, explore Harlem’s evolution. The film documents
the neighbourhood’s transition from a ghetto to gentrified precinct. Within the work,
Harlem is presented as a site of great cultural significance: a place where innova-
tions in art and music have emerged alongside the revolutionary ideas of political
leaders like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X (Fig. 6.4).
The film’s narrator describes how Harlem was once a border town, ‘watched
over’ by its wealthier cousin Manhattan. It was the seat of The Black Rebellion of
the 1960s, characterised by backlashes to racial intolerance and the government’s
16 Anonda Bell, ‘Metropolis Exhibition Brochure’, <http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/metropolis/re-
sources/rb_metropolis.pdf>.
Fig. 6.4 PHAT, Harlem:
The Ghetto Fabulous, 2004.
(http:// www.ngv.vic.gov.
au/metropolis/resources/
rb_metropolis.pdf)
93
Beat Streuli: Pallasades 05-01-01, 2001
failure to address social, political and economic inequities. Through tracing the
‘gentrification’ of Harlem, PHAT suggests that this traditionally Black American lo-
cale is now becoming culturally standardised. The conclusion of the film shows an
altered landscape: a gentrified city where glamorous penthouse apartments are built
on former project sites. Provoking thoughts of cultural territorialisation, PHAT’s
art connects with the expressions of Ross Mawdsley, ®™ark and The Yes Men
examined in Chap. 4.
PHAT uses music to signal a historical progression in the city’s development,
and to point to its changing social identity. 1920s jazz is replaced by rap and more
recent hip-hop. Harlem: The Ghetto Fabulous shows the city’s transformation from
a poor and disenfranchised black American heartland, to an increasingly prosperous
and sanitised white neighbourhood. It suggests that consumerist values have had a
negative impact upon Harlem’s local culture. The film shows how Harlem—once a
radical Black American site—is becoming a culturally standardised space.
Harlem: The Ghetto Fabulous challenges the motives of urban developers, pro-
voking thoughts of cultural appropriation, de-territorialisation and imperialism. To
this end, the film presents a somewhat alarmist account of globalisation, whereby
local cultures are threatened by Capitalist imperatives. In exploring the phenom-
enon’s impacts upon urban spaces, the film engages with Inda and Rosaldo’s ques-
tion: ‘is there a power geometry to globalisation and what might it be?’17 PHAT’s
presentation of Harlem suggests that cultural influence has traditionally flowed in
one direction—from the majority to minority.
Within the film, there is an ironic power shift. The final scene presents affluent
Black Americans living the ‘American Dream’. It shows how globalisation has cre-
ated a new power divide: between rich and poor city dwellers. This points to a new
kind of cultural imperialism—one that is internally rather than externally applied.
While contemporary Harlem is presented as a city empowered by its ‘ghetto status’,
the glamour ascribed is simplistic. PHAT shows Harlem to be a kind of post fin de
siècle Paris enjoying its belleépoque. In showing how ‘gangster culture’ has infil-
trated music and art, PHAT shows Harlem to have a profane vibrancy. As the title
affirms, there is an assumption that the city was ‘fabulous’ just the way it was. As
the final sequence demonstrates, global economic values have created new urban
imbalances, not just between Black and White, but Black and Black. However, the
complex dynamics of affluence versus poverty, and agency versus powerlessness,
are given only a cursory address within the film.
Beat Streuli: Pallasades 05-01-01, 2001
In 2001, Swiss artist Beat Streuli created his cinematic work Pallasades 05-01-01.
Set within the city of Birmingham, the piece depicts the incessant flows of people
moving through a shopping centre. Commissioned by the gallery Ikon, the film
shows the great diversity of people sharing the same city space. Women in hijabs
17 Jonathon Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo (Eds.), The Anthropology of Globalization, p. 12.
94 6 Metropolis: Imagining The Global City
walk alongside men of African descent, while Indian women in saris cross paths
with Western teenagers on their mobile phones. As Golebiewski’s film This is
Where I Live similarly explores, global cities are defined by cultural dynamism
(Fig. 6.5).
Pallasades 05-01-01 engages with the human momentum of the global city. It
supports an ethnographic approach to globalisation, confirming Saskia Sassen’s no-
tion that as nations break down, and no longer act as the sole definers of cultural
identity, ‘a new geography of politics linking subnational spaces takes shape’.18
Globalisation, Sassen suggests, can give us new opportunities for us to combine
cultural practices and to consider ourselves as citizens of the world. This idea reso-
nates with Inda and Rosaldo’s sense that while globalisation can be de-territorialis-
ing, it can also provide opportunities for new forms of cultural remix.19
In focussing upon individuals, Streuli offers a more localised and particular ac-
count of globalisation. In many of Streuli’s works, photographic and cinematic me-
dia are used to explore life in the city. His art depicts how ‘a wide reservoir of pos-
sibilities is best and most easily encountered in the centre, the meeting point of the
city’.20 Pallasades 05-01-01 captures the banal realities of everyday people. Every-
one walks with purpose, seemingly caught in the human current. Seemingly oblivi-
ous to the camera, the film shows urban dwellers going about their usual business:
conversing with friends or chatting on their mobile phones. Although their actions
are banal and unspectacular, human curiosity draws us. The camera offers close-ups
on the faces of individuals, caught in the throng of the urban crowd. As the masses
of faces approach the camera lens, there is the potential to feel overwhelmed. Yet,
the use of silence and slow motion effect softens the impact of the onslaught.
18 Saskia Sassen, ‘Globalization and the Formation of Claims’, p. 87.
19 Jonathon Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo (Eds.), The Anthropology of Globalization, p. 10.
20 Beat Streuli, ‘The Pallasades 05-01-01’, National Gallery of Victoria, <http://www.ngv.vic.
gov.au/metropolis/resources/rb_metropolis.pdf>, 2004, (accessed 19 April 2013). This link is no
longer active.
Fig. 6.5 Beat Streuli, Pallasades 05-01-01, 2001. (http://www.beatstreuli.com/beatstreuli/instal-
lations_data/2006krakow04.jpg)
95
Tom Otterness: Nine Eleven
Pallasades 05-01-01 was publicly screened close to the shopping centre that it
depicts. One BBC reviewer noted how ‘[w]hen you move closer, you don’t want to
watch it for too long while everyone else is rushing past you in a number of different
directions’.21 To this end, the use of silence and slow motion ironically emphasises
the speed and sheer force of people moving through the space. A telephoto lens al-
lows Streuli to achieve a strong, and almost overbearing sense of proximity. It also
enables the artist to capture people unaware, and offer a more natural eye-witness
account of life in a time of globalisation.
Tom Otterness: Nine Eleven
In his 2003 animated film Nine Eleven, Tom Otterness claims that New York is
still ‘the great predictor’22 of Western trends. Like Shoba’s Blowing Zen, the global
city is presented as a cultural icon. Many felt that New York was targeted on 11
September 2001 because it symbolised North American and the Western values. As
Otterness’ film suggests, the crumbling of the World Trade Centre’s twin towers led
some artists to question the city’s resilience and indestructibility (Fig. 6.6).
Nine Eleven has a fairy tale quality about it: it is in some ways reminiscent of
Gulliver’s Travels.23 It also has strong resonances with the Biblical story of the
21 ‘Spinky’, ‘Beat Streuli—The Pallasades 05-01-01 2001’, BBC The Collective, March 2004,
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/A2373103>, 2004, (accessed 19 April 2013).
22 Anonda Bell, ‘Metropolis Exhibition Brochure’, <http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/metropolis/re-
sources/rb_metropolis.pdf>.
23 Jonathon Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, World’s Classics, New York, Oxford University Press, 1998.
Fig. 6.6 Tom Otterness, Nine Eleven, 2003. (Image courtesy of the artist)
96 6 Metropolis: Imagining The Global City
tower of Babel—the tower that watched over the city and came crashing down. The
affect is to make the audience question the lines between fact and fiction, the real,
and the simulated. In reflecting upon his art, Otterness notes that ‘there’s a dark
edge underneath a lot of the work. You can never predict what is going to happen
day-to-day, so this work is all kind of disjointed vignettes, like small chunks of
meaning’.24
The use of animation in Nine Eleven has a disquieting affect, given the horror
and brutality of the terrorism attacks. The film features simple, coloured figures that
leap from buildings with clasped hands. The animated characters seem to make the
events of 11 September 2001 all the more sinister. By using animation—an innocent
format designed for children—Otterness generates shocking affects, reminiscent
of Situationist art. In watching the film, there are moments where the audience
might question what they are seeing, forcing them to construct new contexts of
understanding. That confusion mirrors the disbelief that many viewers would have
experienced as they watched live footage of the attacks on their television and com-
puter screens. The imagery of 11 September 2001 spread quickly across the world,
via global news networks and Internet sites.25 The rapid dissemination of content
confirmed Appadurai’s contention that in an age of globalisation, media, ideas and
information move rapidly.
In the past, Tom Otterness’ art has taken on a number of forms. It has appeared
in galleries as well as informal spaces like New York subways, challenging tradi-
tional expectations senses of art and exhibition. In Nine Eleven animation generates
a new kind of shock, which encourages the viewer to question the appropriateness
of the global televising of traumatic events. To this end, the film affirms Jameson’s
claim discussed in Chap. 2 that ‘there is very little in either the form or the content
of contemporary art that contemporary society finds intolerable and scandalous’.26
Whether Otterness’ presentation of 11 September 2001 is appropriate, however, is
up to the viewer to judge.
Andy Diaz Hope: Financial District Infiltration: Everybody
is Somebody’s Terrorist
Andy Diaz Hope also engages with the 11 September 2001 attacks in Financial
District Infiltration: Everybody is Somebody’s Terrorist. His 2004 film deals with
the social repercussions after the event, and the suspicion that pervaded the West
24 Anonda Bell, ‘Metropolis Exhibition Brochure’, <http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/metropolis/
resources/rb_metropolis.pdf>.
25 For images of September 11 as captured by news sites see: <http://www.september11news.com/
AttackImages.htm>, September 11 News, (accessed 16 December 2007).
26 Fredric Jameson ‘PostModernism and Consumer Society’, p. 124.
97
Andy Diaz Hope: Financial District Infiltration: Everybody is Somebody’s Terrorist
that ‘anyone could be a terrorist’.27 This fear took hold at the level of the State, with
Western governments issuing warnings to citizens to report seemingly ‘suspicious’
behaviours of neighbours, shopkeepers and colleagues. As the curator Anonda Bell
states, ‘[f]or many people those events of 2001 continue to evoke a sense of utter
sadness and anger, and a suspicion of those we do not directly know’.28 In the wake
of the tragedy, Bell notes how ‘the social perception of threat has a power almost
equivalent to that of the threat itself’.29 Within the film, a masked man in a business
suit casually walks the city’s streets. Suspicion turns to comical disbelief as pedes-
trians encounter this ‘everyday’ terrorist (Fig. 6.7).
The film’s title points to a key theme within the work: the influence of global
economic flows within the city. The balaclava worn by the businessman is symbolic
not just of terrorism, but the perceived ‘facelessness’ of corporate culture. As Bell
27 Anonda Bell, ‘Metropolis Exhibition Brochure’, <http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/metropolis/
resources/rb_metropolis.pdf>.
28 Anonda Bell, ‘Metropolis Exhibition Brochure’, <http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/metropolis/
resources/rb_metropolis.pdf>.
29 Anonda Bell, ‘Metropolis Exhibition Brochure’, <http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/metropolis/
resources/rb_metropolis.pdf>.
Fig. 6.7 Andy Diaz Hope,
Financial District Infiltra-
tion: Everybody is Some-
body’s Terrorist, 2004.
(Image courtesy of the artist)
98 6 Metropolis: Imagining The Global City
observes the mask highlights the generic or ‘bland nature of the suited brigade of
corporate workers who frequent city spaces’,30 with the same anonymity as terror-
ists. The subject’s corporate ‘uniform’ makes him indistinguishable from the other
financial district workers. If not for his mask, he would probably go unnoticed.
A camera traces the suspected terrorist’s banal movements. He casually checks
his watch, reads the newspaper, completes an ATM transaction and crosses the road,
unaware of the attention he is attracting. What makes the piece comical is the nor-
mality with which he pursues his daily activities. As he moves through the streets of
San Francisco, the camera records the mixed reactions of passers-by—from shock
to apathy. Shot at close range, the camera captures the suspect’s every move. The
jarring hand-held camera work creates the sense that the viewer is the pursuer, while
over-the-shoulder shots give a sense of surveillance.
The camera tracking, which record’s the subject’s every movement, simulates
closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras that are increasingly common in urban
sites The ATM acts as another point for surveillance: a prominent sign states ‘you
may be video recorded during this transaction’.31 The theme of video surveillance
connects with dialogues regarding online monitoring and privacy, in an age where
information can be shared globally via the Internet. Yet, while online identities can
be easily concealed, it is more difficult to do so in the physical world—unless we
all don balaclavas. Financial District Infiltration: Everybody is Somebody’s Terror-
ist makes us question our initial judgements of others. As the work’s title suggests,
no one is exempt from this judgement, for anyone can be someone else’s suspected
terrorist.
In creating the film, Diaz Hope was influenced by popular concerns about ter-
rorism post 11 September 2001. He notes that ‘events of recent years have taught
us that the key strength of terrorists is the unexpected nature of their activities—the
traditional boundaries of warfare have dissolved and a seemingly mild-mannered
office worker may have ulterior motives’.32 However, our surveillance of the sus-
pect within the film fails to produce any incriminating evidence. Apart his different
dress, there is nothing about his behaviour that is different or unusual. When the
film ends, we may be left with a sense of disappointment or shame, as we con-
template our false suspicion. As Diaz Hope observes, ‘we are left feeling deflated,
amused, and slightly guilty for having been so paranoid without due cause’.33 To
this end, Financial District Infiltration: Everybody is Somebody’s Terrorist encour-
ages us to think about the bases for our judgements and vilifications of others—be
they neighbours, peers or simply those from different cultures.
30 Anonda Bell, ‘Metropolis Exhibition Brochure’, <http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/metropolis/
resources/rb_metropolis.pdf>.
31 Anonda Bell, ‘Metropolis Exhibition Brochure’, <http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/metropolis/
resources/rb_metropolis.pdf>.
32 Anonda Bell, ‘Metropolis Exhibition Brochure’, <http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/metropolis/
resources/rb_metropolis.pdf>.
33 Anonda Bell, ‘Metropolis Exhibition Brochure’, <http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/metropolis/
resources/rb_metropolis.pdf>.
99
Abbey Williams: YES
With global cities such as San Francisco experiencing heightened flows of ref-
uges, immigrants and visitors, almost everyone is a stranger to someone else. As
captured by local media and often exploited by politicians, there is some popular
fear that these unknown people will threaten our jobs, children, safety, or way of
life. After 11 September, the US government posted the slogan ‘[i]f you see some-
thing, say something’34 inside New York subways. Similar campaigns were run in
Australia, with fridge magnets sent to citizens to remind them to be on the lookout.
This points to the frightening banality of terrorist policing, with everyday people
encouraged to identify and turn in ‘suspects’.
As Diaz Hope’s art powerfully captures, the events of 11 September 2001 sig-
nificantly affected urban life, not just in North America, but also around the world.
Cities like Sydney and Tokyo staged evacuation drills, and assessed their levels of
attack preparedness, and implemented security measures such as CCTV. As West-
ern governments continue their respective ‘wars on terror’, we are left to consider
this question posed by the curators: ‘who will fall under the scrutiny of the govern-
ment as traditional terrorists become harder or more difficult to find?’35 With civil
liberties potentially threatened by false claims, the notion of democratic freedom in
a global age comes to the fore.
Abbey Williams: YES
In her 2002 film YES, Abbey Williams further explores the notion of the stranger.
Her focus, however, is not on danger but romantic potential. Williams shows how
the cramped space of a New York subway train forces strangers to make contact,
through minor bumps and physical collisions or crossing lines of gaze. She reflects
on the awkwardness of being in such close proximity to strangers. The artist shows
commuters resisting contact by down casting their eyes, and creating ‘buffer zones’
next to their bodies. In this way, YES evokes senses of human transience and forced
connection in a global city space. Through camera close-ups, eye-line and point-of-
view shots, Williams articulates the global city in terms of individual encounters. To
this end, she offers a micro and affective account of a space, which is often defined
by the macro and impersonal: colossal architecture, industrial triumphs, soaring
stocks, and great cultural and political feats (Fig. 6.8).
William’ film YES also explores the idea that friendships and relationships can
be difficult to sustain, in a city where life is often too fast to catch one’s breath.
The train’s circular route emulates the cyclical turnovers of partners, fleeting hu-
man relationships, and difficulty of making lasting connections in fast-paced and
constantly shifting metropolis. As the train pauses at each station, new passengers
34 Anonda Bell, ‘Metropolis Exhibition Brochure’, <http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/metropolis/
resources/rb_metropolis.pdf>.
35 Anonda Bell, ‘Metropolis Exhibition Brochure’, <http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/metropolis/
resources/rb_metropolis.pdf>.
100 6 Metropolis: Imagining The Global City
alight replacing that have disembarked. This action emulates the movement of part-
ners through people’s lives: each seat has been occupied and vacated, and old decla-
rations have been overlaid with new graffitied expressions. The jarring movements
of the hand-held camera and flickering neon lights add to these feelings of human
impermanence. In sharp contradiction, the train also offers a notion of timeless con-
tinuity—one that resonates with Shoba’s portrayal in Blowing Zen. There can be
conflicting senses of the global city, which points to the difficulty of categorising
experiences in either-or terms.
Although no words are ever exchanged, potential lovers are identified within
the film. The camera pans up and down the bodies of commuters, occasionally
zooming into allow for scrutiny. A bold caption staring ‘YES’, ‘NO’ or ‘MAYBE’
briefly appears next to their body, reflecting the observer’s superficial assessment
of them as a suitable mate. From time to time, the camera lingers on a subject and
the caption changes, presumably after the viewer has had a better look. This show
how assessments of others can be arbitrary within the global city, confirming Diaz
Hope’s notion in Financial District Infiltration: Everybody is Somebody’s Terrorist.
Handheld camera and point-of-view shots allow us to share the protagonist’s
perspective, and perhaps become a ‘co-conspirator’ in their harsh assessments of
others. We might even catch ourselves ruling out others based on surface criteria as
physical attributes or ethnicity. As Anonda Bell observes, in a fast-paced metropolis
[t]here is no time to be wasted on someone who is not up to par. Williams states that through
her work she traces ‘the line between ecstasy and the constraint of my consumption as an
attempt to break down the fuzzy binarism of our yes-or-no culture.36
By involving the viewer, Williams encourages us to question our judgements of
strangers.
36 Anonda Bell, ‘Metropolis Exhibition Brochure’, <http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/metropolis/
resources/rb_metropolis.pdf>.
Fig 6.8 Abbey Williams,
YES, 2002. (http://www.
bellwethergallery.com/
artindivid02.cfm?PageNum_
artc=26&fid=322)
101
Cristian Alexa: 10-Second Couples
In YES close-ups on breasts, legs and buttocks reveals our sexualisation of oth-
ers. This brutal or even predatory behaviour is mirrored online—on dating sites, for
example, where assessments of others are quickly made based upon upon superfi-
cial search criteria such as ‘tall’, blonde’ or ‘athletic’. Yet, while online profiles can
be heavily edited, other users can still feel that they intimately know the person that
they are communicating with, quickly shifting them from the status of stranger to
friend or mate. Within YES, an exchange of looks, a fleeting smile, or the brief meet-
ing of hands can also alter our perceptions of others, which can be arbitraily made.
In this way, Williams’ film engages with the construction of would-be terrorists in
Andy Diaz Hope’s Financial District Infiltration: Everybody is Somebody’s Terror-
ist. Williams’ art shows how people can be treated like global stocks: traded, sold
and ruthlessly replaced. Love it seems is simply another commodity up for grabs.
In non-stop cities such as New York—where speed dating, power walks and quick
meals are common—time is of the essence, and judgments need to be made quickly.
The fleetingness of human encounter is explored in the following work: 10-Second
Couples by Cristian Alexa.
Cristian Alexa: 10-Second Couples
Like Abbey Williams’ YES, the theme of urban transience is strong within Cris-
tian Alexa’s 10-Second Couples. Alexa’s film features a woman striding down 14th
Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues in New York. A hand-held camera tracks her
movements from behind, providing the audience with a voyeuristic view. As the
subject walks on, she casually links hands with those of passers-by. Her walking
remains purposeful, as she fails to acknowledge the person by her side. This seems
to show a lack of emotional connection or commitment to the exchange. After link-
ing hands for 10 s, the woman inexplicably breaks the connection and joins hands
with another. Her actions leave strangers dumbfounded, particularly when she on
her way, without so much as looking back. As each new ‘relationship’ is formed, she
shows no acknowledgement of the person by her side (Fig. 6.9).
Alexa’s use of a single cinematic take dramatises the impact of the female sub-
ject’s actions. In doing so, the artist questions the unwritten conventions of ‘ac-
Fig. 6.9 Cristian Alexa,
10-Second Couples, 2000.
(Black and white video with
sound, 6’38” on a loop,
Image courtesy of the artist,
2000)
102 6 Metropolis: Imagining The Global City
ceptable’ social behaviour. As Anonda Bell elaborates, the pavement can function
as an ‘equalising place where people are forced to mingle, however briefly, with
other occupants of the city, irrespective of gender, class, or occupation. It is a place
where both predetermined and involuntary interactions occur, sometimes in stifling
proximity.’37 Notions of proximity and physical encounters connect this work to the
previous case study discussed.
As the title suggests, 10-Second Couples points to the fleetingness of human
connections in a global city. Each transaction is flippant and arbitrary, with the
connection typically lasting no more than a few seconds. Within the film, rela-
tionships are shown to be disposable and replaceable. This speaks to the countless
‘friendships’ that people have on social media sites, and the difficulty of sustaining
them in meaningful ways. At times contact lists are reviewed, with names ruth-
lessly deleted from social media and mobile phone address books. In a similar way,
Cristian Alexa presents a city shaped by rapid and insincere connections. His film
echoes Joseph Nye’s sense that since the 1990s, globalisation seems to have ‘sped
up’ life in the metropolis. He notes that while it has been around for some time,
‘it’s been increasing in pace during the recent period…you could say that what’s
happened to globalization is that it’s become quicker.’38 10-Second Couples shows
how in fast cities such as New York, there is little time to forge lasting human con-
nections.
The film’s protagonist approaches love in a clinical way. Her tunic—which is
stylistically akin to a lab coat—suggests a rationalist scientific approach to the
‘business’ of love. The subject’s lack of emotion suggests that dating in New York
is just like a transaction. However, the conjugations are random and chances of
success limited. The provincial score, which merrily plays in the background, ironi-
cally evokes notions of village weddings and traditional romantic ideals. A faint
drumbeat however, suggests a new primordialism built upon impulsive and car-
nal desires. In 10-Second Couples, the protagonist does not discriminate between
partners—it does not seem to matter who she is with, just as long as she is with
someone. In making the film, Alexa was intrigued by what he terms the ‘contin-
gency aspect of relationships’. His artwork is guided by three key questions ‘How
do people meet and drift away? What does the first moment of a chance encounter
entail? How do we remember it?’ These questions engage with need for human
connection, stability and continuity in a time when senses of homeland, tradition
and togetherness can be challenged.39
37 Anonda Bell, ‘Metropolis Exhibition Brochure’, <http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/metropolis/
resources/rb_metropolis.pdf>.
38 Joseph Nye, ‘Globalization and its Discontents’, UN, <http://209.85.173.104/search?
q=cache:Iykpey-GIkwJ:unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/APCITY/
UNPAN005944.pdf+sped+up+time+globalization&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=au>, 2001,
(accessed 15 December 2007). This link is no longer active.
39 Christian Alexa, ‘Email conversation’, 18 July 2013.
103
Brian Alfred: Overload
Brian Alfred: Overload
Metropolis curator Anonda Bell writes that there are ‘certain types of structures
that differentiate cities from smaller towns; they include towering office blocks,
commuter transit zones, large-scale sporting arenas and industrial zones’.40 Brian
Alfred’s xxx animated film Overload explores the built environment of New York
City. His work engages with what he terms ‘the visual experiences we encounter in
our everyday global, corporate, natural, urban and technologically enhanced envi-
ronments’.41 The American artist integrates techniques derived from painting, illus-
tration and collage. Alfred incorporates images derived from advertising, print and
the Internet. Through combining analogue and digital media, Alfred creates art that
converses with the rise of technology, spread of corporatism, saturation of media,
expansion of industry within the global city. To this end, his work serves as a form
of cultural critique, much like a Modernist film or expression (Fig. 6.10).
Overload is constructed as a city symphony. The film begins at dawn and closes
at dusk, capturing the cyclic flows of New York. Rhythmic music contributes to this
sense of continuity. Yet, the artwork offers a desolate rendering of the city. Human
figures are presented in black silhouette, with their individual features obscured. In
an Intel office, balloons drift up to the ceiling, pointing to the remains of an office
party. While human life is suggested, there is no one in sight. In one of the final
scenes, a skyscraper’s lights slowly switch off, pointing to the human ‘ghosts’ that
the building. This ‘facelessness’ suggests a cold and hostile urban landscape, which
is dominated by corporatism and industry.
Alfred is intrigued by the interplay between what he describes as ‘the control and
chaos…comfort and anxiety’42 of life within the city. Overload depicts computers
and keyboards piled high, servers left to blink, and nuclear plants on the horizon.
40 Anonda Bell, ‘Metropolis Exhibition Brochure’, <http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/metropolis/
resources/rb_metropolis.pdf>.
41 Anonda Bell, ‘Metropolis Exhibition Brochure’, <http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/metropolis/
resources/rb_metropolis.pdf>.
42 Anonda Bell, ‘Metropolis Exhibition Brochure’, <http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/metropolis/
resources/rb_metropolis.pdf>.
Fig 6.10 Brian Alfred,
Overload, 2004. (http://www.
textura.org/imagesgraphics/
brianalfred1.jpg)
104 6 Metropolis: Imagining The Global City
The title of the work is revealing, in suggesting the detrimental impacts that indus-
trialisation is having upon the environment, and the inability for humans to keep
with technological advances. As a plane flies overhead, birds and leaves slowly
scatter. Alfred shows an urban landscape that appears hostile to human life. An
Exxon logo and biohazard sign are contrasted with images of a natural environment.
In the final scene, skyscraper office lights spell out the word ‘help’.
Overload presents a calm environment that seems to be acquiescent with its fate.
Like Otterness’ Nine Eleven, colourful animation and child-like depictions only
serve to heighten the impact of the message. The flat, two-dimensional images of
nuclear reactors and high voltage electrical wires suggest that there is only a surface
public awareness of the impacts that industry is having upon the natural environ-
ment. Alfred’s remediation of content sourced from the mainstream media, suggests
that shallow reporting on environmental issues is leading to a popular apathy. Alfred
portrays a futuristic, technological world, where civilisation appears on the verge
of collapse.
Conclusion
Each artwork discussed in this chapter, provides a diverse account of globalisation,
its affects upon the city and the individuals that inhabit its spaces. The Metropolis
artists’ eclectic expressions converse with Adam Kuper’s claim that ‘globalisation
occurs as the personal experience of a great many people in networks where ex-
tremely varied meanings flow’.43 This statement reflects the subtle iterations be-
tween the local and global, in the formation of collective meaning and individual
response. This interplay is expressed as a juxtaposition of public and private space
in This is Where I Live, and in the contrast between local and global politics evident
in PHAT’s Harlem: The Ghetto Fabulous.
As a key global city, New York figures prominently in the Metropolis films.
In Tom Otterness’ Nine Eleven, Abbey Williams: YES and Shoba’s Blowing Zen,
New York is depicted as the epitome of the global metropolis: a key generator of po-
litical, ideological, media, human and economic flows. Shoba’s ironic rendering of
New York in his sublime digital film Blowing Zen explores the ‘emptying out’ of the
metropolis in the aftermath of 11 September 2001. Shoba’s New York functions as
a critical mirror, which captures the rise of the global flows of media and consump-
tion. While Blowing Zen presents a transcendent and post-apocalyptic vision of the
city, Tom Otterness’ Nine Eleven directly engages with the event. Using mythology
and allegory, his whimsical animations challenge the perceived indestructibility of
global cities. He notes how the city ‘is both growing and dying; it is subject to con-
tinuous change’.44 This sense is sympathetic to Frank Stilwell’s belief that ‘cities
are focal points of structural change, caught between contradictory pressures’.45
43 Adam Kuper (Ed.), Conceptualizing Society, London, Routledge, 1992, pp. 146–147.
44 Anonda Bell, ‘Metropolis Exhibition Brochure’, <http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/metropolis/
resources/rb_metropolis.pdf>.
45 Frank Stilwell, ‘Going Global’, p. 2.
105Conclusion
Abbey Williams’ YES focuses on love and the difficulties of making lasting hu-
man connections in a global city like New York. By setting her film on a New York
subway train, Williams constructs metaphors for human transience and momentum.
Through presenting a crowded space, she counters Shoba’s de-humanised rendition
of New York. The packed train symbolises the relentless human flow, the sense of
people colliding
and moving apart, short-term relationships of patterns of fleeting encounter, which offer the
contexts in which globalization occurs as the personal experience of a great many people in
networks where extremely varied meanings flow.46
These three diverse artworks reveal how a single theme such as New York City in an
era of globalisation, can generate three very different responses, and unique ways of
framing them through digital art. Those differences highlight the danger of making
macro or general claims about the experience of phenomena.
A central idea of Metropolis is the notion that the city is the sum of its people.
From Tom Otterness’ Nine Eleven to PHAT’s Harlem: The Ghetto fabulous, the
cultural values, practices, and aspirations of people are what shape its identity, and
give it its raison d’être. Shoba’s message in Blowing Zen, for example, is that a
city devoid of people is a city without a soul. That claim is also evident in Nicholas
Golebiewski’s This is Where I Live, Tom Otterness’ Nine Eleven and PHAT’s Har-
lem: The Ghetto Fabulous, which provide highly personal accounts of life within
global cities. These artworks resonate with the Aristotelian sense that ‘we must
rather regard every citizen as belonging to the city, since each is a part of the city;
and the provision made for each part will naturally be adjusted to the provision
made for the whole’.47
The Metropolis films suggest new readings of globalisation, as a relational and
essentially ‘human’ phenomenon creating new spaces beyond traditional borders
and constructs. The works suggest that in understanding globalisation, individual
affects are just as important as macro political-economic processes. The exhibi-
tion presents contrary accounts of globalisation and the ways in which it manifests
in urban spaces. Artists like PHAT and respond positively, while others such as
Cristian Alexa and Abbey Williams show about its impacts upon human relation-
ships. Golebiewski offers a more shaded response in This is Where I Live. The
artist engages with the phenomenon’s positive and negative social impacts and in
doing so, disrupts the binary of alarmism/determinism that tends to dominate popu-
lar accounts. By showing how digital media can facilitate different perspectives,
Metropolis makes room for individual experiences of the global city. The following
chapter will further explore this new awareness of art and in the context of globali-
sation and digitisation.
46 Ulf Hannerz, ‘Notes on the Global Ecumene’, p. 46.
47 Aristotle, Politics, (Trans. E. Barker), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 298.
107
Chapter 7
In the Line of Flight: Changing Practices
in Digital Art
M. Langdon, The Work of Art in a Digital Age: Art, Technology and Globalisation,
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4939-1270-4_7, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Introduction
This chapter continues to explore digital art’s ability to localise globalisation, though
focussing upon the micro, affective and personal experiences of participants. Key
artworks from the exhibition In the Line of Flight are used as examples. With a focus
upon ‘changing practices in digital art, this chapter will examine a global exhibi-
tion held in synchrony with an international symposium in Beijing. This exhibition
also showcases contemporary practices in the curation of digital artworks. It will
explore curators’ understandings of digital art, and how it might offer critical per-
spectives on globalisation. The inclusion of this chapter and its sequencing enables a
direct comparison to be made to the Metropolis exhibition discussed in the previous
chapter. It also points to some of the diverse practices characteristic of digital art,
foregrounded in Chap. 2. The exhibition featured an eclectic array of digital art for-
mats, from video games to responsive garments and haptic installations. In the Line
of Flight also reflects the different degrees to which artists are identifying changing
practices in art, and engaging with those realities in their works will be examined.
Lastly, the organisation of this exhibition was a global endeavour, involving artists
and participants from around the world. The curation of exhibitions such as In the
Line of Flight points to the new ways that art is being made and curated, in an era of
globalisation (Fig. 7.1).
Through direct reference to In the Line of Flight this chapter will show how
globalisation can gain context and meaning through affective expression. It will ex-
plore the idea that digital art can offer rich and individuated expressions of globali-
sation, through technologies that engage and personally respond to users. In making
this claim, it will be argued that the unique interactive, haptic, and responsive ‘tools’
of digital art can create layered and nuanced understandings of globalisation and
provide new modes of understanding it as a human and localised phenomenon. In
selecting seven standout works from the exhibition, this chapter will examine the
degree to which digital artists observe changing practices in the field, and engage
with globalisation’s influences upon production.
108 7 In the Line of Flight: Changing Practices in Digital Art
The seven key works that will be discussed from the exhibition are: Leon Cmielews-
ki and Josephine Starrs’ Floating Territories (2004), Blast Theory’s Can You See Me
Now? (2001–2007), Justine Cooper’s Transformers (2002), Marnix de Nijs’ Run
Motherfucker Run (2004), Kaho Abe and Jung Sin’s Haptic Glove (2004), and Joanna
Berzowska’s Intimate Memory Shirt (2004), and Feathery Dresses (2004). Each case
study has been deliberately chosen for its original use of digital media, reflection of
cultural diversity and critical commentary on globalisation and its human affects.
This international digital art exhibition was held at the China Millennium Art
Museum in Beijing 2005. A key theme of the exhibition concerned changes to art
production and distribution in an era of globalisation. The exhibition title In the Line
of Flight captured the cultural flux of the times. The term ‘flight’ suggests motion
and transcendence from earlier cultural and artistic practices, while reflecting a con-
sciousness of homeland, destination and the departed. A line of flight is also a concept
expressed by Deleuze and used extensively in his work with Guattari. As translated
by Brian Massumi, ‘there are lines of articulation segmentarity, strata and territo-
ries; but also lines of flight, movement deterritorialisation and destratification’.1
We might conceptualise affective digital art works—and individual responses to
them—in terms of the ‘multiplicities, lines, strata and segmentarities, lines of flight
and intensities’2 that they generate.
1 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 3.
2 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 4.
Fig. 7.1 In the Line of Flight, 2005. (http://newmediabeijing.org/md2005/exhibition.php?sec tion=2)
109Global Collaboration
Global Collaboration
The exhibition and symposium that comprised In the Line of Flight were hosted by
Tsinghua University, in conjunction with Karlsruhe’s ZKM: Centre for Art and Me-
dia, and V2_Institute for Unstable Media, Rotterdam. The artistic director, Zhang
Ga (China), worked in close association with curators from around the world, to
include: Alex Adriaansens (The Netherlands), Sara Diamond (Canada), Antoanetta
Ivanova (Former Soviet Union), Yukiko Shikata (Japan), and Peter Weibel (Aus-
tralia). As such, the exhibition was the product of global endeavour—it was organ-
ised through digital communications, created through global collaboration, featured
works from around the world, and was held in Beijing—a leading global city. As
a collaborative project between artists, theorists and curators, In the Line of Flight
emulates the global construction of T_Visionarium described in Chap. 4.
All of the works explored are examples of global art. A number of the pieces,
such as Marnix de Nijs’ Run Motherfucker Run, have been produced through world-
wide collaborations between individuals and research centres. Others artworks—
such as Blast Theory’s Can You See Me Now—have been distributed over the Inter-
net and have employed global media and modes of networking and communicating,
such as GPS technology and online chat forums. These practices suggest new levels
of mobility, communication and transferability in the production and display of art.
To this end, global exhibitions like In the Line of Flight signify new trends in art
collaboration, creation, distribution and display. Many of the artworks exhibited
explored the symposium’s themes of global cultural change, ideological flow, West-
ernisation, consumption, travel and de-territorialisation.
This interplays between artistic practice and discourse within the works, con-
verse with the Modern notion of the ‘creative industrialist’ discussed in Chap. 2,
and reflects a new style of production, evocative of iCinema’s critical art. This rela-
tionship between digital art practice and discourse, confirms artistic director Zhang
Ga’s claim that these works wittingly use digital media in the construction of critical
messages.3 He writes that ‘[n]o longer sufficient are simple questions of ideology,
economical determinism, the new condition demands ad hoc improvisation, rapid
prototyping, instantaneous sampling’.4 Ga points to a new kind of artistic ‘alchemy
that operates not only on the production of objects but also on the (re)construction
of subjectivity’.5 To this end, digital art can offer micro, personalised and affective
responses to globalisation.
In seeking to creating linkages between the seven works selected, we might ex-
plore the curator’s statement that the exhibition ‘presents representative works of
telematic art, virtual reality, net art, robotic art, interactive cinema, software art,
nano art, and other new forms facilitated through media technologies. It testifies to
a new aesthetic sensibility accentuated by the struggle of city dwellers, proposing
3 Zhang Ga, ‘Section One: New Media Art as Global Cultural Alchemy’, NewMediaBeijing.org,
<http://newmediabeijing.org/md2005/symposium.php?section=3>, 2004, (accessed 22 September
2007).
4 Zhang Ga, ‘Section One’, <http://newmediabeijing.org/md2005/symposium.php?section=3>).
5 Zhang Ga, ‘Section One’, <http://newmediabeijing.org/md2005/symposium.php?section=3>).
110
new perspectives on contemporary urban conditions from around the world’.6 The
first implication of this claim is that the artworks reveal a shift in the construction
and facilitation of art. In their experimentations with mixed technologies—from
digital software to robotics, and nanotechnology—they are seen as representative of
the digital art genre. The second is that the exhibition explores life within the global
city, and a new aesthetic realisation. If the artists indeed convey this ‘sensibility’,
then how is it demonstrated and further, how might it contribute to our understand-
ings of globalisation? In considering these questions, this chapter begins with an
exploration of Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski’s Floating Territories.
Leon Cmielewski and Josephine Starrs: Floating Territories
Floating Territories is a collaborative project between Australian artists Josephine
Starrs and Leon Cmielewski. Both practitioners are known for creating works that
transcend the boundaries of art, in creating cross-sections between digital video and
games. They use video gaming ‘as a springboard for exploring contemporary issues
around real and virtual territory’.7 The artists’ 2004 interactive Floating Territories
is presented as a video game. A typical experience consists of the user entering the
small, darkened space to be confronted by an interactive console, connected to a
projection screen and speaker system. Five options are marked on the display: es-
cape; defend; petition; colonise and wander. If a user selects ‘defend’, they are con-
fronted with gridlines reminiscent of early computer games. An ominous grey cloud
slowly passes across the screen; it can only be repelled through user response. The
conquering mass is threatening, and might be seen as being symbolic of globalisa-
tion’s cultural, political and economic de-territorialisations (Fig. 7.2).
If one chooses the option ‘petition’, a Lego™ styled figure appears within a
rotating sphere. By interacting with the console, the user can direct the avatar to
pick up written petitions. Manoeuvrability is however, highly limited. This may
be designed to encourage the user to contemplate wider issues, such as the dif-
ficulty of gaining support for petitions against global threats. The artists ®™ark
and The Yes Men explored in ‘Chap. 4’, similarly depict this impenetrability. To
‘wander’ in the art, is to create ‘boundaries’ that appear in response to the user’s
movements. Grid-lines are constructed and illuminated in vibrant paint box hues
such as yellow, white, and red. Through constructing differently coloured zones,
Starrs and Cmielewski’s art evokes globalisation’s cultural divisions and segrega-
tions of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. Klein’s ‘fences and windows’ analogy, explored in
detail in Chap. 2, might articulate this conception of globalisation.8
6 Zhang Ga, ‘Section One’, <http://newmediabeijing.org/md2005/symposium.php?section=3>).
7 Antoanetta Ivanova, ‘Floating Territories’, NewMediaBeijing.org, <http://newmediabeijing.org/
md2005/exhibition_display.php?section=2&link_id=8&title=Floating+Territories+%28AU%29
&artist_id=8_3>, 2004, (accessed 22 September 2007).
8 Naomi Klein, Fences and Windows.
7 In the Line of Flight: Changing Practices in Digital Art
111
Leon Cmielewski and Josephine Starrs: Floating Territories
As a work of art Floating Territories converses with the rise of digital technol-
ogy that has facilitated global communication. The graphics of Floating Territories
are designed along Mondrian lines, revealing the artists’ remediation of ‘old-school’
art graphics in dialogue with the latest digital art forms. If not for the provocative
game titles, the installation might appear as benign as a children’s game. In doing
so, it engages with curator Antoanetta Ivanova’s claim that ‘when playing, gam-
ers are asked to make decisions, placing them in the arbitrary position of being,
for example, a defender of territory, a nomad or a wanderer’.9 Floating Territories
localises globalisation, through placing complex social and political choices in the
hands of individuals. The use of a innocent gaming frameworks has resonances
with Blast Theory’s Can You See Me Now? The tactic accentuates the malignance
of global events such as de-territorialisation, and human responses that can range
from engagement to ineffectual action to ambivalence.
Cmielewski and Starrs’ installation also suggests that digital art has the capac-
ity to explore ‘spaces in-between’, led by critical nuance, perception, physical in-
stinct and subjective response. To this end, their art defies the fixity of boundaries
through temporal fluctuations and negotiations of real and virtual space. The artists’
installation provides an affective and localised framework for articulating globalisa-
tion’s movements of people and impacts such as migration, colonisation and human
disapora. The artists argue that the installation ‘provide(s) pathways for gamers to
engage with and explore a range of issues around territory and space’.10 The notion
of individual accountability comes into play, as users are made to feel responsible
for their actions. Their slowness in response, for example, can see a territory con-
querered, leading to political ‘game over’.
Floating Territories casts globalisation and digitisation as a series of causal
processes, that involve: escape; defence; petition; colonisation; and wandering.
As these categories suggest, Starrs and Cmielewski’s perception of globalisation
is largely pessimistic. In games such as ‘petition’, the joystick and interface were
often difficult to manoeuvre or unresponsive, making it difficult to gain a positive
outcome. Territories were invaded, regions were conquered, and it was difficult to
gain the petitions required to progress. This seemed to pre-determine a negative
9 Antoanetta Ivanova, ‘Floating Territories’, <http://newmediabeijing.org/md2005/exhibition_
display.php?section=2&link_id=8&title=Floating+Territories+%28AU%29&artist_id=8_3>.
10 Antoanetta Ivanova, ‘Floating Territories’, <http://newmediabeijing.org/md2005/exhibition_
display.php?section=2&link_id=8&title=Floating+Territories+%28AU%29&artist_id=8_3>.
Fig. 7.2 Josephine Starrs and
Leon Cmielewski, Floating
Territories, 2004. (Image
courtesy of the artist)
112
outcome, and accordingly, engage with only one side of globalisation’s story. While
Starrs and Cmielewski’s articulate globalisation’s movements of people across geo-
graphical borders, only one side of the story is presented. While the artists contend
that Floating Territories produces ‘a trans-local, multifaceted experience’,11 this
claim might be challenged due to the predominantly pessimistic view of globali-
sation presented, which limits the complexity of its positive and negative human
affects.
Blast Theory: Can You See Me Now?
Blast Theory is a UK group of artists concerned with the boundaries between real-
ity and simulation. Using performance, video games, and mobile technologies in
their art, they raise questions about surveillance, regulation and control. Modelled
on the children’s game Scotland Yard™, Blast Theory’s Can You See Me Now? is
produced as an interactive game: with a video screen, speaker system and interac-
tive console. The live video feeds, reveal the locations of six players located on the
streets of Rotterdam. The artwork uses GPS data that is fed back into the system.
The game takes place over five days, and is constructed as a battle between virtual
users at their computers, and the Blast Theory gamers on the streets (Fig. 7.3).
When users log in to the game, a white pawn appears as their virtual represen-
tation. The objective is for the online users to locate and corner, the orange pawns
representing the members on the street. Through this dynamic, Can You See Me
Now? stages an ironic battle between digital artists and users. The participants are
able to influence the narrative direction of the art. Advanced digital communica-
tions enable virtual and physical players to communicate with each other, devise
tactics and create alliances. Through communicating by digital radio transmitters,
the online users can attempt to track Blast Theory members through analysis of the
audio feeds.
Through blurring the binaries physicality and virtuality, object and subject, game
and art, Can You See Me Now? blends complex digital media with everyday com-
munication technologies. Blast Theory uses a simple game concept, adopts video
game principles and incorporates GPS enabled mobile phones, satellite feeds, digi-
tal radio transmitters and Palm Pilot™ technologies. The work may be perceived
as work of digital art, an interactive video game, an experiment in recombinatory
technology, or a discursive construct. Through highlighting some of the more in-
trusive and voyeuristic aspects of global communication technologies, Can You See
Me Now? demonstrates high levels of self-reflexivity: it uses digital media to pose
questions about surveillance, simulation, and the fluidity of boundaries.
In this way, digital art such as Can You See Me Now? emerges from a two-way
dialogue between medium and message. As examined earlier in this book, this re-
11 Antoanetta Ivanova, ‘Floating Territories’, <http://newmediabeijing.org/md2005/exhibition_
display.php?section=2&link_id=8&title=Floating+Territories+%28AU%29&artist_id=8_3>.
7 In the Line of Flight: Changing Practices in Digital Art
113
Blast Theory: Can You See Me Now?
lationship has often been weighed differently. For formal artists, the onus was upon
aesthetics, and the level of artistry and ‘aura’ attained. Post-structuralists however,
placed a greater emphasis upon the message, and the artwork’s deconstruction of its
media. What artworks such as Can You See Me Now? and Territorism II achieve, is
a more subtle negotiation of subject and object, or message or medium. As explored
further in this chapter, many of the more critical expressions in digital art have wit-
tingly used the digital ‘medium’ to create critical messages about global technolo-
gies, and their impacts upon art and experience.
In conceptual terms, Can You See Me Now? is not dissimilar from ‘old school’
analogue games. Yet, the incorporation of online gaming, digital avatars, chat
groups, and global surveillance, specifically connect it to this moment in time. The
artwork only makes sense in terms of globalisation and digitisation, as phenomena
that share the same historical space. While the makers’ stance on global surveillance
is not explicitly expressed, we might assume from the tensions within the game, that
these issues are met with some trepidation. The capture of victims, and online ar-
chival of their ‘blue prints’, highlights digital technology’s systems of control, and
issues such as the ownership of the image, classifications of information, and re-
strictions of access. Self-referencing tendencies and ironic misuses of media, might
locate Can You See Me Now? in terms of post-structuralist works, by artists like
®™ark and The Yes Men. Yet, Blast Theory arguably goes further, in exploring the
limits of digital media-message dynamics. Through hybrid elements that incorpo-
rate video gaming, installation art, Internet art, online chat rooms and performance
art, Can You See Me Now? tests the boundaries of digital art practice and discourse.
Rosemary Klich engages with N. Katherine Hayles’ theories of subjective em-
bodiment in her discussion of Can You See Me Now?12The installation, she argues,
upsets the formal dichotomy of physical presence/virtual absence. The binary, Klich
claims, is founded on the notion that ‘live performance involves the disappearing
12 Rosemary Klich, ‘Performing Posthuman Perspective: Can You See Me Now?’, <http://scan.net.
au/scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=91>, Scan Journal of Media Arts Culture, Vol. 4, No. 1,
2007, (accessed 11 December 2007).
Fig. 7.3 Blast Theory, Can
You See Me Now? 2005.
(http://www.blasttheory.
co.uk/bt/work_cysmn.html)
114
presence of the body, while mediated representation denies presence, presenting
an absence of the body’.13 As discussed in Chap. 7, the digital work Can You See
Me Now? integrates real-time street action with virtual play. Klich states that ‘the
concept of presence is no longer associated with corporeality and the distinction
between absence and presence becomes blurred’.14 Through employing Hayles’ ‘se-
miotics of virtuality’,15 Klich suggests that ‘the dialect of presence/absence, and by
association the dialectic of live/mediated, has become limited frameworks through
which to articulate the complexities of mixed-reality performance’16 works such as
Can You See Me Now? The installation provides new ways to interact, create, and
play, using global technoscapes and media. Instead of suggesting an absence of
presence, Klich argues that the installation locates the participant in three distinct
but simultaneous spatialities: “[t]hey exist as a body in front of the computer, as a
constructed identity in the online gaming world, and then they are also represented
by the locative technology of the runners as a ‘blip’, a ‘data-body’, a disembodied
entity moving through the streets of the city”.17 In this way, digital artworks like
Can You See Me Now? re-centre understandings of globalisation around embodi-
ment and affective subjectivities. In this way, digital art can provide new under-
standings of globalisation’s divergent an at times, contradictory affects.
Justine Cooper: Transformers
Justine Cooper’s 2002 installation Transformers was created after a visit to China,
which, the curator Antoanetta Ivanova claims was a culturally confronting experi-
ence that made her reconsider the boundaries of culture and identity. Ivanova writes
that for Cooper, ‘[b]eing an outsider to Chinese culture was both a confronting and
revelatory experience that prompted her to look deeper into and question how we
communicate difference’.18 Themes of cultural transference, subjectivity, memory
and representation pervade the artist’s work. Depictions of fingerprints, human
faces, English, and Chinese text engage with globalisation’s cultural and human
surges. Hybrid media such as a projection screen, DVD system, audio channels,
and photographic imagery, contribute to the artwork’s themes of unification and
13 Rosemary Klich, ‘Performing Posthuman Perspective: Can You See Me Now?’, <http://scan.net.
au/scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=91>.
14 Rosemary Klich, ‘Performing Posthuman Perspective: Can You See Me Now?’, <http://scan.net.
au/scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=91>.
15 Rosemary Klich, ‘Performing Posthuman Perspective: Can You See Me Now?’, <http://scan.net.
au/scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=91>.
16 Rosemary Klich, ‘Performing Posthuman Perspective: Can You See Me Now?’, <http://scan.net.
au/scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=91>.
17 Rosemary Klich, ‘Performing Posthuman Perspective: Can You See Me Now?’, <http://scan.net.
au/scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=91>.
18 Antoanetta Ivanova, ‘Transformers’, <http://newmediabeijing.org/md2005/exhibition_display.
php?section=2&link_id=8&title=Transformers+%28AU%29&artist_id=8_4>.
7 In the Line of Flight: Changing Practices in Digital Art
115
Justine Cooper: Transformers
eclecticism. Through conducting interviews, Justine Cooper collected testimonies
and photographs from a diverse range of participants. She deliberately chose immi-
grants, or individuals who had travelled between different cultures and geographical
regions. To support her exploration of memories and experiences, the artist acquired
DNA samples of hair strands from the subjects that were then incorporated into
the art. Cooper used them as a premise from which to explore genetic differences,
leading to arguments about nature and nurture and external impacts upon individual
socio-cultural affiliations (Fig. 7.4).
In exploring questions of identity, Transformers reveals a concern for the dy-
namics of information flow, and how ideas about culture and human identity are
globally transmitted. Cooper’s art also expresses an interest in how scientific data
is calculated, shared, and stored. The artist’s incorporation of scientific principles
such as DNA and X-Ray imaging, challenges the parameters of art and the tendency
to cast art as emotional, irrational and abstract, in direct contrast to the sciences.
Cooper’s integration of qualitative and quantitative concerns, defies binary gener-
alisations. Her practice sheds new light on globalisation, as the sum of its dynamic
and differential affects.
Justine Cooper’s use of audio-visual montage complements the theme of cultural
connectedness and inter-spatiality. Through those strategies, her art poses the ques-
tions: can culture be defined? How are local and global allegiances balanced? And,
how might we interpret cultural histories and traditions? Cooper’s style of biologi-
cal digital art is apposite to address these questions, through its incorporation of
hybrid artistic-scientific principles, practices, and ethics. The physical construction,
and discursive themes of Transformers, creates new spaces between the universal
and the particular, the political and the affective, and traditional notions of the artis-
tic (irrational and abstract), and the scientific (logical and material).
Through integrating individual memories and personal anecdotes, Cooper
strengthens these threads. Her integration or ‘real’ materials such as photo me-
dia and hair stands and exploration of human memory and reverie, questions the
Fig. 7.4 Justine Cooper,
Transformers, 2002. (http://
www.adelaidebiennial.com/
cocoon/adelaidebiennial/
cooper_justine.xml?thing=/
adelaidebiennial/xsl_project.
xsl)
116
borderlines between the actual, virtual, imagined and metaphysical. By doing so,
the artist provides a new way of perceiving digital art, as a form of expression
grounded in the material traditions of art: painting, sculpture, photography, and si-
multaneously ‘un-bound’ from the trappings of physical construction and display.
Through Transformers, Coopers shows how digital artworks might resist formal
categorisations of art, in the same way that globalisation might transcend rigid con-
ceptualisations. The following questions, posed by the exhibition curators, further
point to that intent: ‘[d]oes identity really rest purely in our genetic programming?
Is being an individual an oxymoron if we are fated to become what we are? To
change our nature do we merely tinker with the human genome? Can genetic de-
terminism really account for the complexity of human consciousness, the beauty
of being, the contingency of existence and the randomness of speciation?’19 Justine
Cooper’s examination of individual experiences and cultural consciousnesses cre-
ates windows from which to explore these fundamentally human questions.
Cooper’s presentation of an original Chinese culture might also disrupt fears that
local cultures are being completely dominated by North American and Western ide-
als. In revealing a culture that is assured of its present and past, she depicts a nation
that is confident of its own cultural path. While the artist invokes some of the West-
ern idioms that have been embraced, she suggests that the fusion of local-global
ideals makes Chinese culture richer. Cooper’s subjects are presented as vibrant and
contemporary hybridisations, a notion that is replicated in the installation’s mosaic
construction. As a collage of identities, the artist presents these individuals as cul-
tural works in progress. She claims ‘[t]here was an observable plasticity in who
these people were and what they could become, and an ability to use this plasticity
in navigating contemporary society.’20 In this way, Cooper localises global cultural
change.
The narrative of Transformers is temporally and sequentially unstructured, and
is evocative of iCinema’s T_Visionarium. The use of audiovisual layers in both
works supports the arguable iterations of memory, culture, history, and imagination.
In commenting upon this strategy, Ivanova writes: ‘[f]or Cooper it is about the small
and intricate personal details that we uphold as true and meaningful. It is where
the incredible beauty and transcended humanity of our difference is to be found’.21
Digital artists ranging from Golebiewski to PHAT, similarly show the importance
of local, private, and particular accounts, in the face of globalisation’s potentially
subsuming cultural impacts.
19 Antoanetta Ivanova, ‘Transformers’, <http://newmediabeijing.org/md2005/exhibition_display.
php?section=2&link_id=8&title=Transformers+%28AU%29&artist_id=8_4>.
20 Antoanetta Ivanova, ‘Transformers’, <http://newmediabeijing.org/md2005/exhibition_display.
php?section=2&link_id=8&title=Transformers+%28AU%29&artist_id=8_4>.
21 Antoanetta Ivanova, ‘Transformers’, <http://newmediabeijing.org/md2005/exhibition_display.
php?section=2&link_id=8&title=Transformers+%28AU%29&artist_id=8_4>.
7 In the Line of Flight: Changing Practices in Digital Art
117
Marnix De Nijs: Run Motherfucker Run
Marnix De Nijs: Run Motherfucker Run
‘You have left a party late at night or in the early hours of the morning and you find
yourself in a transformed city. You start to run’.22 Alex Adriaansen’s description of
Marnix de Nijs Run Motherfucker Run is an apt description of the kind of experi-
ence that a user might expect. Constructed in 2004, Run Motherfucker Run is com-
posed as a digital installation incorporating a treadmill, interactive sound and video
system, and an 8 × 4 m projection screen. Upon the user’s approach, the work’s
visuals grow and diminish in intensity, tempting the subject onto the larger-than-life
5 × 2 m treadmill. Marnix de Nijs is renowned for art that explores the contingen-
cies arising from the bodily experience of digital technology. He provides limited
instruction on how to approach the art, yet the user soon determines that their bodily
position and running speed guides the audio system, sequence of imagery, and its
visual intensity. In an explanation of his piece, curator Alex Adriaansens writes, ‘[t]
he distance you run on the conveyor belt is the same distance you will cover in the
virtual city in front of you. By quickening your pace, the acceleration of the belt as
well as the speed of the image increases and depending on your running behaviour
and the directional choices you make, the progress of the film is determined’.23 The
urban imagery projected is formed of 2D and 3D video footage taken from real,
global cities. It incorporates images of deserted streets, a night train, and urban
obstacles (Fig. 7.5).
Run Motherfucker Run presents the global city as an ominous space. Its streets
are deserted and poorly lit: reminiscent of the journey home that night-clubbers or
shift workers might make. De Nijs’ art reveals a darker side of metropolitan life,
22 Alex Adriaansens, ‘RMR—Run Motherfucker Run’, NewMediaBeijing.org, <http://newmediabeijing.
org/md2005/exhibition_display.php?section=2&link_id=2&title=RMR+-+Run+Motherfucker+Run+
%28NL%29&artist_id=2_1>, 2004, (accessed 1 October 2007). This link is no longer active.
23 Alex Adriaansens, ‘RMR—Run Motherfucker Run’, <http://newmediabeijing.org/md2005/ex-
hibition_display.php?section=2&link_id=2&title=RMR+-+Run+Motherfucker+Run+%28NL%2
9&artist_id=2_1>.
Fig. 7.5 Marnix de Nijs, Run
Motherfucker Run, 2004.
(http://www.marnixdenijs.nl/
run-motherfucker-run.htm)
118
contrasting to the brightness of day, and the optimistic portrayals of global cities,
and their human potential. The emptying of the city of inhabitants is reminiscent
of Shoba’s Blowing Zen. The desertion of a usually busy metropolis challenges
our expectations of the city as being the product of its people. De Nijs’ installation
presents the global metropolis as a faceless and generic landscape, hostile to its
citizens cast as ‘motherfuckers’. In artistic terms, Run Motherfucker Run creates
intersections between game art, cinema, installation, soundscape, and real-time per-
formance. The artist uses responsive and participatory media to discuss the presence
and affect of human bodies within global metropolitan spaces, raising questions of
purpose, individuality and identity in a global world. The opportunity to create an
original path or history also exists within the work. The interactive video interface
and fluctuations of speed and visual display mean that no single journey is the same:
each is an individual experience or enactment of urban change. To begin the experi-
ence is however, a conscious choice. As Adriaansens explains, ‘you must move in
order to see the image’.24 While the user maintains some control, through using
their pace to adjust the speed of the belt, a fair level of adeptness is necessary.
In order to function effectively, the installation requires moderate momentum to
maintain the brightness and clarity of the visuals. The work’s dynamic ‘creates a
temperamental balance between control and non-control of the situation you volun-
tarily entered into when you first stepped on the treadmill’.25 Run Motherfucker Run
is dangerous art. With a top speed of 30 km/h, there is a high chance of being hurled
backwards onto the soft ‘catchment’ at the base that seems to pre-empt a fall. If the
user takes too long to discover that user pace determines the speed of the treadmill,
they can be left desperately clutching for the rails. Inevitably, they will be dragged
backwards, and the narrative will end. The title of the art acknowledges with mirth,
the probability of that outcome: for the user to become a helpless ‘motherfucker’.
Run Motherfucker Run presents the global city as a foreboding space, with iso-
lated landscapes and dark and beguiling streets. The installation’s disjointed narra-
tive structure—coupled with graphics that rise and diminish in clarity—bewilder
and alienate the user. Matrix grids connect this work to early speculative science
fiction texts such as Steven Lisberger’s 1982 film Tron. In countering the notion
of the global city as a landscape promising hope and opportunity to its citizens,
de Nijs’ presents a city that is hostile to its inhabitants. If a user runs too fast, they
invariably meet with adversity: as they are hurled backwards, the narrative comes to
an end. If they slow their pace, the visuals diminish in clarity and the sound begins
to flatline. Either way, an experience of Run Motherfucker Run culminates in the
death of either the city or metaphorically, the individual.
24 Alex Adriaansens, ‘RMR —Run Motherfucker Run’, <http://newmediabeijing.org/md2005/ex-
hibition_display.php?section=2&link_id=2&title=RMR+-+Run+Motherfucker+Run+%28NL%2
9&artist_id=2_1>.
25 Alex Adriaansens, ‘RMR—Run Motherfucker Run’, <http://newmediabeijing.org/md2005/ex-
hibition_display.php?section=2&link_id=2&title=RMR+-+Run+Motherfucker+Run+%28NL%2
9&artist_id=2_1>.
7 In the Line of Flight: Changing Practices in Digital Art
119
Marnix De Nijs: Run Motherfucker Run
The installation generates physical and perceptual responses to a stylised global
city. In doing so, it suggests that understandings of global spaces emerge from a
nexus between subjective interpretation and bodily response. This reading convers-
es with Marjorie O’Loughlin’s sense of ‘embodied subjectivity’26 that “captures a
sense of the human being’s ‘immersion’ in places, spaces and environs in which, as
gendered subjects, they encounter the world as dwelling place”.27 What we might
take from O’Loughlin’s claim, is that subjectivity is not ‘outside’ or detached from
the body, but directly informed by corporeal encounters with spaces, and times.
As has been suggested in relation to globalisation and digital art, specific contexts,
phenomena, and environs significantly shape interpretation and experience. Yet, as
shifting and contingent triggers, they generate impacts that can be difficult to de-
fine. In this way, responsive and generative forms of digital art might generate new
understandings of subjective embodiment and globalisation and art.
Digital art such as de Nijs’ Run Motherfucker Run can provide affective and lo-
calised understandings of globalisation through haptic, immersive, and responsive
technologies that engage with the dynamic realms of human experience and affect.
While the artworks might represent the artists’ individual perceptions, the use of
tactile and responsive digital media directly engage with the body and, in some
cases, enable the user to direct the narrative and audiovisual sequencing. If we view
subjectivity and experience as malleable constructs, then we might begin to see how
digital art can express individual encounters with globalisation. This notion echoes
the sense that the individual body is the “glue” that underpins consciousness and
connects it with subperceptual sensorimotor processes.28 This understanding builds
upon Hansen’s construction which ‘wants materially to link the flow of informa-
tion in the digital image and the body as frame.29 Hansen claims that by placing the
embodied viewer-participant into a circuit with information, the installations and
environments they create function as laboratories for the conversion of information
into corporeally apprehensible images’.30
In his articulation of phenomena, Hansen writes that what digital media ‘ulti-
mately yields is less a framed object than an embodied, subjective experience that
can only be felt’,31 so that ‘as media lose their material specificity, the body takes
on a more prominent function as a selective processor of information’.32Digital art’s
emphasis upon sensory affects might shift the focus away from static, ‘framed’, or
universal definitions of subjects such as globalisation. As Hansen elaborates, ‘the
26 Marjorie O’Loughlin, ‘Intelligent Bodies and Ecological Subjectivities: Merleau-Ponty’s Cor-
rective to PostModernism’s Subjects of Education’, Philosophy of Education <http://www.ed.uiuc.
edu/EPS/PES-Yearbook/95_docs/o’loughlin.html>, 1995, (accessed 10 December 2007). This
link is no longer active.
27 Marjorie O’Loughlin, ‘Intelligent Bodies and Ecological Subjectivities’, <http://www.ed.uiuc.
edu/EPS/PES-Yearbook/95_docs/o’loughlin.html>.
28 Mark B.N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, p. xxiv.
29 Mark B.N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, p. xxiv.
30 Mark B.N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, p. 11.
31 Mark B.N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, p. 14.
32 Mark B.N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, p. 22.
120
viewer must participate in the process through which the mediated digital data is
transformed into a perceivable image…it is the body—the body’s scope of per-
ceptual and affective possibilities—that Kaho Abe & Jung Sin informs the medial
interfaces’.33 In digital artworks, interaction encourages affective response.
Run Motherfucker Run expresses some of the fears associated with globalisa-
tion: that individuals will succumb to its over-bearing technologies, floods of in-
formation and systems of control, for example. The installation might also be seen
to confirm Anna Munster’s sense that computerised bodies ‘work as differential,
qualitative fields within the art work introducing the capacities of bodies, whether
social, historical or biological to sustain different speeds and intensities in relation
to informatic speeds’.34 The installation’s momentum and displacement of user con-
trol, mirrors the sensation of ‘surfing the web’, the timelessness of digital space and
the difficulty of physically detaching ourselves, once we are virtually engaged. As
Anna Munster advances, ‘[d]igital culture provides a stark contrast between differ-
ent vectors of speed, informatic and organic being the most obvious, and it also mul-
tiplies the opportunities for these contrasting vectors to cross each other’s paths’.35
In arguing that ‘[i]n this way they introduce a break in the machine flows of the
information economy and move us in the direction of a computer image capable of
producing new affects’,36 Munster might suggest a new way of thinking about the
digital art as a generator of differential affects—much like interactive and participa-
tory forms of digital art.
Kaho Abe and Jung Sin: Haptic Glove
Haptic Glove, designed by Kaho Abe and Jung Sin, is a set of interactive gloves
that responds to users’ hand movements. The artists are intrigued by the intersec-
tions between art and technology, and their surrounding contexts. Jung Sin studies
interactive technology and design. His colleague, Kaho Abe works as a fashion
designer, constructing garments that utilise wearable technology. Abe’s art explores
human applications of technology and the ways in which digital media can generate
connection and interaction. Abe and Sin claim that a handshake is a globally under-
stood gesture of trust, friendship and alliance.37 In building upon this concept, they
constructed gloves that could interact with each other and generate sound rhythms.
Music is used in the work, because it arguably ‘transcends language barriers, creat-
ing opportunities for people to communicate even if they do not understand each
33 Mark B.N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, p. 22.
34 Anna Munster, ‘Low-res Bleed’, pp. 85–86.
35 Anna Munster, ‘Low-res Bleed’, p. 90.
36 Anna Munster, ‘Low-res Bleed’, pp. 85–86.
37 Zhang Ga, ‘Haptic Glove’, <http://newmediabeijing.org/md2005/exhibition_display.
php?section=2&link_id=18&title=Haptic+Glove+%28USA%29&artist_id=18_5>.
7 In the Line of Flight: Changing Practices in Digital Art
121
Kaho Abe and Jung Sin: Haptic Glove
other’s spoken words’.38 The gloves explore the boundaries of global contact, where
non-verbal, and text-based communication can become as important as verbal com-
munication. By grasping hands, users can create refrains in synchrony. Through
encouraging non-verbal means of interaction such as touch, play and sound, the
artists instigate a new form of cross-cultural dialogue on globalisation, centred upon
human interaction and response (Fig. 7.6).
Through using a simple and globally understood gesture like a handshake,
Haptic Glove shows how digital media can be familiar, approachable, affective.
Through incorporating digital technology into the gloves, the artists may seek to
counter trepidation associated with digitisation and perceived affects of immaterial-
ity, simulation, and displacement. Through devising a form of digital art that is fun
and universally understood, Jung Sin and Kaho Abe’s Haptic Glove challenge the
critique that digital art is hostile, intimidating, and alienating. By using ‘soft’ and
tactile technology, Sin and Abe’s art aims to bring individuals humans together in
an era of globalisation. The artists strive to create a work that is understandable to
young and old, individuals from different cultures, and those with different levels
of digital literacy.
Haptic Glove might be understood in terms of Inda and Rosaldo’s thesis that in an
era of globalisation and digitisation, human connection can be broken into two es-
sential forms: the first characterised by direct, or face-to-face contact, and secondly,
by virtual interaction ‘made possible by transport and communications systems’.39
Yet, the artwork arguably goes further in creating a new realm ‘in-between’; one
that negotiates the separation of physical and virtual space. Through this process,
they provide a more nuanced perspective on digitisation, by highlighting the contra-
dictions of human connection and disjuncture. Through centralising the individual
in their art, Sin and Abe emphasise the role of the affective body in discourses on
global technologies. Although users are restricted by the gloves’ boundaries and
tones, they can effectively influence and manipulate the pre-existing system. Haptic
Glove thereby suggests that the individual is a central element in the experience of
38 Zhang Ga, ‘Haptic Glove’, <http://newmediabeijing.org/md2005/exhibition_display.
php?section=2&link_id=18&title=Haptic+Glove+%28USA%29&artist_id=18_5>.
39 Jonathon Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, (Eds.), The Anthropology of Globalisation, p. 8.
Fig. 7.6 Kaho Abe and Jung
Sin, Haptic Glove, 2005.
(http://newmediabeijing.org/
md2005/exhibition_display.
php?section=2&link_id=18&
title=Haptic+Glove+%28US
A%29&artist_id=18_5)
122
global-digital systems. Although this idea is not always explicitly expressed, Haptic
Glove provides new ways of understanding digitisation and globalisation, as phe-
nomena interpreted by subjectively embodied individuals.
Joanna Berzowska: Intimate Memory Shirt/Feathery
Dresses
Jung Sin and Kaho Abe’s Haptic Glove provides a critical framework for contem-
plating Joanna Berzowska’s Intimate Memory Shirt and Feathery Dresses. Ber-
zowska is a digital artist and Assistant Professor in Design and Computation Arts, at
Concordia University. Her academic background informs her conceptualisation of
memory and affect in her works of art. Berzowska’s memory-rich garments, which
recall users’ whispers and touches, arguably make sense in terms of affective dis-
courses (Fig. 7.7).
Berzowska’s art suggests that the body is part of wider system, influenced by
the world and the contexts that surround it. Affect to this end, is seen as ‘the ac-
tive discharge of emotion, the counterattack’.40 What this understanding gives to
Berzowska’s art is an awareness of her intent in presenting garments that are inti-
mate, in as much as they ‘remember’ their histories of touch. Haptic technologies
encourage affective and highly personalised responses to digitisation. In doing so,
they contest categorical and macro accounts, that overlook the particularities of
individual encounters and affects.
The garments counter the contention that “in its obsession with developing a
‘machine’ aesthetic digital artwork might stand accused of neglecting affective, aes-
40 Anna Munster, ‘Low-Res Bleed’, p. 87.
Fig. 7.7 Joanna Berzowska, Intimate Memory Shirt, 2005. (Image courtesy of the artist)
7 In the Line of Flight: Changing Practices in Digital Art
123
Joanna Berzowska: Intimate Memory Shirt/Feathery Dresses
thetic experience”.41 In contrast to this claim, Intimate Memory Shirt and Feathery
Dresses use tactic and feminine technologies that facilitate intimacy and sensual
touch, in dialogue with digitisation. The artist’s ‘soft’ affects privilege bodily re-
sponses over political articulations. The application of her approach, to discourses
on globalisation and digitisation, might particularise the phenomena, through mak-
ing them familiar and seemingly within ‘reach’. Affect illuminates issues such as
the haziness of recollection: the personalisation of memory, and the subtleties of
cultural difference.
Berzowska’s Intimate Memory Shirt and Feathery Dresses have the capacity
to remember human touches, and the time lapses between interactions. Intimate
Memory Shirt incorporates a digital microphone, which is sewn into the collar of
the garment. The reverberations of voice or breath are recalled, stimulating a pat-
tern of lights that light up from the waste to the collar of the shirt. The symbolic
feathers encourage subjects to explore questions about sensual touch and intimacy,
animalistic behaviour, and femininity in a digital oeuvre. Through using soft, haptic
technologies, and feminine emblems such as feathers, flowers and dresses, the gar-
ments interrogate the perceived hostility, inoperability and masculinity of digital
technologies. By integrating digital technology into wearable examples of art, Ber-
zowska challenges the traditional limits of art production, while opposing construc-
tions of digital change centred upon disconnection, dislocation, dehumanisation or
masculinisation. In Joanna Berzowska’s art, sensual and affective encounters with
digital technology are as important as the politics of any objet d’art (Fig. 7.8).
Berzowska’s garments have the ability to ‘remember’ interactions. That record-
ing of events contests the perceived transience of digital events. The garments’
‘memories’ bind users to their actions, thereby challenging the perceived dimin-
ishing of responsibility, anonymous sexualisation of others and concealment of
41 Anna Munster, ‘Low-Res Bleed’, p. 78.
Fig. 7.8 Joanna Berzowska, Feathery Dresses, 2005. (Image courtesy of the artist)
124
identity, in a digital age. Within these works, the body becomes a critical platform
expression. In making it so, Berzowska draws attention to the themes of localisa-
tion, particularisation, and individuality. ‘A worn object’, the curator Sara Diamond
writes, ‘carries the evidence of our identity and our history. Digital technologies al-
low us to shape and edit that evidence to reflect more subtle or more poetic, aspects
of our identity and our history’.42 In this way, Berzowska’s digital art encourages
physical engagement rather than virtual disembodiment, in an era of digital change.
Berzowska offers contrary accounts of globalisation and digitisation, centred
upon the intimacy of touch, emotional connection, sensuality, and subjective inter-
pretation. She uses digital media to re-materialise human connection, while oppos-
ing the supposed ‘hardness’ of the technology. In these ways, Berzowska’s art might
contest the perceived masculine control of global politics, economy and technology.
This is the strength of the artist’s work: the disruption of worn assumptions about
globalisation’s affect that limit its potential to be anything else. Joanna Berzowska’s
Intimate Memory Shirt and Feathery Dresses instead, shows how digitisation can
enable individuals to grasp globalisation’s reins, using its flows of technology to
defy totalising assumptions and create spaces for human connection, exchange and
liberation.
Conversations on Globalisation
In their eclectic and often divergent treatments of globalisation, the In the Line of
Flight artists suggest the fallacy of unified approaches to phenomenon. As many
of these works illustrate, globalisation does not create simple binaries between the
local and global, the particular and universal, but eclectic experiences that move
in, and between these constructs. The exhibition’s theme is the lynchpin that brings
these diverse expressions together. In reflecting upon the themes of globalisation
and ‘flight’, the art ‘testifies to a new aesthetic sensibility accentuated by the strug-
gle of city dwellers, proposing new perspectives on contemporary urban conditions
from around the world’.43 As the curators of In the Line of Flight propose, ‘the exhi-
bition suggests integrity in diversity, possibilities derived from multiplicity’.44 This
is reflected in the variant platforms used, from virtual reality systems to interactive
cinema, net.art, robotics, and haptic media. The difference in the artists’ approaches
to globalisation however, confirms Mark Tribe’s sense that ‘[w]hile in a material
sense, the Internet is a globally homogenous network with common tools and pro-
42 Sara Diamond, ‘Feathery Dresses’, NewMedia.org, <http://newmediabeijing.org/md2005/
exhibition_display.php?section=2&link_id=4&title=Feathery+Dresses+%28CND%29&artist_
id=4_2>, 2004, (accessed 1 October 2007).
43 Zhang Ga, ‘In the Line of Flight—Transcending Urbanscapes’, <http://newmediabeijing.org/
md2005/exhibition.php?section=2>, NewMedia.org, 2004, (accessed 1 October 2007).
44 Zhang Ga, ‘In the Line of Flight—Transcending Urbanscapes’, <http://newmediabeijing.org/
md2005/exhibition.php?section=2>.
7 In the Line of Flight: Changing Practices in Digital Art
125Conversations on Globalisation
tocols, and while it is contributing, perhaps more than any other technology, to the
globalisation of economies and cultures…it nevertheless means different things in
different parts of the world’.45 The artists’ employment of different media and tech-
niques facilitate diverse experiences, in as much as they provide means to present
different perspectives on the globalisation and digitisation of daily life.
Some of the more powerful works examined in this chapter are arguably Justine
Cooper’s Transformers and Joanna Berzowska’s Intimate Memory Shirt and Feath-
ery Dresses. Cooper shows high level of innovation, through weaving human DNA
into her installation—literally centralising the individual in her art. To this end,
Transformers operates as an active critique of globalisation’s particular impacts.
Similarly, Joanna Berzowska’s memory-rich fabrics critically simulate and inter-
rogate, affects such as intimate touch and response. Through these processes, the
artist enables the subject to personally experience the global ‘technoscape’, through
focusing upon digital technology’s capacities for physical engagement, localisation,
personalisation and human connection. By breaking down categorical assumptions
about globalisation and digitisation, Berzowska and Cooper show how digitisation
can be subjectively experienced.
The artists Leon Cmielewski and Josephine Starrs reveal a different application
of digital media. In their installation Floating Territories, Cmielewski and Starrs
employ ‘old school’ gaming technologies to construct a contemporary critique of
Appadurai’s globalisation’s flows of politics, people and ideology.46 The simplicity
of the format ironically heightens the gravity of the themes: world domination, colo-
nisation, and corporate takeover. The often disastrous outcomes that result from the
user’s decision to ‘escape’, ‘defend’ or ‘petition’ present a construction of globalisa-
tion that is in some ways sympathetic with the reactive net.art of Ross Mawdsley,
®™ark, and The Yes Men. The artists’ portrayal of simplistic toy figures resonates
with the Lego-like™ characters in ®™ark’s Etoy campaign. Cmielewski and Starrs’
use of a highly structured grid system ironically sheds light onto perceived spatial,
temporal and human disruptions, under globalisation. The title Floating Territories,
and search options like ‘Wander’, address themes of diapora, travel, and escape; en-
gaging with globalisation’s facilitation of virtual and physical travel across borders.
The artists’ work creates interplays between ordered and regulated, fluid and demo-
cratic space. As discussed in Chap. 7, Cmielewski and Starrs’ conflicting spatial and
temporal arrangements might emulate the haphazard experiences of online gaming,
and traversing global spaces such as the Internet.
While Cmielewski and Starrs’ use a mix of new and old formats, Marnix de Nijs
employs the latest haptic and kinetic technology to depict the metropolis of Run
Motherfucker Run. The use of potentially ‘hostile’ technology, such as a treach-
erous treadmill, and audiovisuals that seemingly shift of their own accord, por-
tray a dehumanised and indifferent global city. While Cmielewski and Starrs cre-
ate disjunctures between their media and messages—a tactic that raises awareness
through shock—Marnix de Nijs’ use of hostile technologies supports his portrayal
45 Mark Tribe, Foreword, pp. xi–xii.
46 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Culture Economy’, pp. 295–310.
126
of a de-humanised city. In Run Motherfucker Run, de Nijs exploits techniques and
technologies unique to digital technology. As the central interface, the treadmill is
not only interactive, but also responsive to the user’s movements in real-time. The
installation’s visual sequencing and audio frequencies are generated in response to
the user’s footsteps. In this way, de Nijs illustrates digital art’s potential to decon-
struct globalisation’s spaces and times, and reconfigure these constructs according
to individual encounters, bodily rhythms and flows.
To that end, Run Motherfucker Run becomes a personal projection of the phe-
nomenon, which while influenced by the artists’ selection of audiovisual material,
provides scope for the individual to ‘choose their own adventure’, and construct
their own narrative sequence. Like Cmielewski and Starrs, de Nijs’ presents an
ominous rendering of globalisation. Through the trajectory of the global city, he
presents a threatening landscape, composed of dark, labyrinthine streets. The instal-
lation’s disjointed sequencing adds to this sense. While the cushions at the base of
the treadmill seem to pre-empt the user’s (down)fall. Like Floating Territories, Run
Mother fucker Run might stand accused of presenting only one side of globalisa-
tion’s story, a claim which would align it with more alarmist accounts, associated
with some early net.art renderings of globalisation, and speculations on digitisation
by Baudrillard.
Conclusion
This chapter has examined digital artworks made by different artists from diverse
parts of the globe. It has shown how despite their points of departure different art-
ists are exploring the production and individual experience of digital art in a global
age. Through a case study approach, this chapter has revealed how many artists are
engaging critical theories and ideas concerning subjectivity, embodiment, cultural
identity, the universal and the particular. It has argued that many new digital art-
works are conveying heightened levels of criticism and nuance in their engagement
with globalisation and digitisation’s impacts. Haptic and tactile art it has claimed,
can engage with individual bodies and subjectivities and present globalisation as
something more layered than a universal construct. Artworks such as Joanna Ber-
zowska’s tactile Feathery Dresses and Intimate Memory Shirt draw out this idea:
the notion that as a technological process aligned with globalisation, digitisation is
a complex phenomenon that can be personally ‘felt’. By engaging with an eclectic
array of contemporary works, the richness and diversity of digital artistry and affect
has been shown. At the same time, this chapter has revealed how haptic art such as
Marnix de Nijs’ Run Motherfucker Run creates two-way dialogues with the user, by
physically responding in real-time and encouraging the individual contemplation
of themes such as the global city, rapid digital speed and temporal transcendence.
In this way, de Nijs encourages the user to perceive and determine globalisation’s
affects.
7 In the Line of Flight: Changing Practices in Digital Art
127Conclusion
In the Line of Flight’s exciting mélange of works suggests the variances and
inter-flows of subjective construction, personal experience, particular interpretation
and physical response. In exploring these diverse artworks, this chapter has engaged
with changing methods in art production and display, in dialogue with globalisation.
Each artwork has been analysed in terms of its engagement with the phenomenon,
and the artist’s cognition of its affects upon the artwork’s themes and construction
methods. Finally, this chapter has shown how through their negotiations of digi-
tal media, digital artists are generating affective messages about globalisation and
globalisation. Their practice suggests the need for new conceptualisations about
globalisation and digital art, as phenomena that might inform each other. This idea
will be explored further in the following chapter, which will discuss artworks made
from 2009 on that engage with digital art and social engagement.
129
Chapter 8
Digital Art and Social Engagement
M. Langdon, The Work of Art in a Digital Age: Art, Technology and Globalisation,
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4939-1270-4_8, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Introduction
One of the most notable trends since 2009 has been the rise of social activist or ‘call
to action’ works. In an age of digital connectivity, artists are exploiting new levels of
access and exposure to launch social and political conversations. Alternative means
of financial backing are being exploited, while social media is being used as an
inexpensive way to promote works. Artists are increasingly using mobile devices
to make art and distribute it online. This chapter examines a number of more recent
digital works that reflect these shifts (Fig. 8.1).
Kevin Macdonald: Life in a Day
The 2011 film Life in a Day, directed by Kevin Macdonald, was created as a crowd-
sourced feature. The filmmakers invited people from around the world to film their
lives on a single day: 24 July 2010. Participants were given three questions to re-
spond to: ‘what do you have in your pocket?’ ‘who do you love?’ and ‘what do you
fear?’ Incredibly, over 80,000 films from 192 countries were received. 400 cameras
were also sent out to developing countries to attempt, in Macdonald’s words, ‘to
paint a global picture’. He notes: ‘I didn’t want a global film that’s just about rich
people, or Europeans and North Americans.’1 Life in a Day gained vast amounts of
attention online. As of January 2013, the film had received 37,785,322 views.2 The
film was shared on YouTube and distributed by National Geographic Films, which
contributed to the vast amounts of publicity it received.
1 Courtney Boyd Myers, ‘YouTube’s Life in a Day Movie is a Stunner’, The Next Web, </http://
thenextweb.com/google/2011/06/15/youtubes-life-in-a-day-movie-is-a-stunner/>, 2011, (accessed
1 August 2013).
2 Kevin Macdonald, ‘Life in a Day’, <http://movies.nationalgeographic.com/movies/life-in-a-day/
about-the-production/>.
130 8 Digital Art and Social Engagement
Social and Political Messages
There are a number of thematic crossovers in Life in a Day, with participants fre-
quently addressing topics such as environmental sustainability, economic inequity,
social equality and social and political disparities between ‘the West and the rest’.
To this end, the film converses with recent movements around the world, such as the
Occupy Wall Street protests and 2011 Arab Spring. Since 2010, there has been a rise
in ‘call to action’ works, distributed online and designed to generate conversations
on current global social and political issues.
Within Life in a Day, universal questions are used to structure and frame the
film. The filmmakers use universal themes—such as hopes for the future—to create
narrative cohesion. In collating and cutting the footage, editor Joe Walker notes how
Fig. 8.1. Kevin Macdonald, Life in a Day, 2011. (http://movies.nationalgeographic.com/movies/
life-in-a-day/about-the-production/)
Social and Political Messages 131
[o]ne could always rely upon millions of coincidences and rhymes in this material…just
because of the sheer volume and range of it. So when we had to move big chunks of the
film into a different order, and had to lose connections we’d begun to rely upon, we knew
that other connections would swiftly take their place.3
Writing for The Next Web, Courtney Boyd Myers discusses two scenes in the film
where the same question is posed: ‘what do you have in your pocket?’ In the first
scene, a man pulls out a Lamborghini key. A juxtaposing shot features a Haitian
man who declares: ‘I have nothing.’ Similar parallels occur throughout the film, to
highlight similarities and differences in the human condition. These thematic cross-
overs and collisions encourage contemplation of global social and political issues
such as poverty, consumption, and socio-political inequity. Boyd Myers claims that
when reviewing the footage received, natural patterns began to emerge. She states
that ‘[c]ontributors tended to film either themselves or people known to them. They
followed distinct patterns of a daily routine in many cases—waking, washing, walk-
ing, and eating.’4
Editing plays a key role in Life in a Day, given the lack of a conventional narrative.
The entire editing process took 7 months due to the submission of more than 4500 hours
worth of footage by global contributors. The editor sought natural connections, to prog-
ress the film’s themes and narrative momentum. Adam Sternbergh writes in The New
York Times how ‘[t]he film aims to tell the story of a planet, but it’s the vulnerability
of these individual moments, contributed as part of a larger project, that lingers.’5 As a
highly emotive work, Life in a Day has a strong audience impact (Fig. 8.2).
3 Joe Walker, ‘Life in a Day’, YouTube/National Geographic Films, <http://movies.nationalgeo-
graphic.com/movies/life-in-a-day/about-the-production/>, (accessed 1 August 2013).
4 Courtney Boyd Myers, ‘YouTube’s Life in a Day Movie is a Stunner’, </http://thenextweb.com/
google/2011/06/15/youtubes-life-in-a-day-movie-is-a-stunner/>.
5 Adam Sternbergh, ‘Around the World in One Day’, New York Times, <http://www.nytimes.
com/2011/07/24/mag-azine/around-the-world-in-one-day-on-youtube.html?_r=0>, (accessed 30 July
2011). Link no longer active.
Fig. 8.2 Kevin Macdonald,
Life in a Day, 2011. (http://
movies.nationalgeographic.
com/movies/life-in-a-day/
about-the-production/)
132 8 Digital Art and Social Engagement
Global Production
As an online crowd sourced film, Life in a Day was created as a global production.
In commenting upon the methods used to obtain the footage for the film. Macdon-
ald argues that ‘[w]hile the concept of a global project like this may not be new,
the media in which the elements are laid out—the Internet, and in particular, You-
Tube—is certainly groundbreaking.’6 In addition to exploring universal themes, the
film has been made through global crowd sourcing. In commenting upon the film’s
online distribution, the director argues that the Internet operates as ‘a great meta-
phor for and a creator of connectedness’.7 Macdonald claims that
[t]he film is doing something that wouldn’t have been possible pre-Internet, specifically
pre-YouTube. The idea that you can ask thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of
thousands of people all to contribute to a project and all to communicate about it and learn
about it at the same time belongs essentially to this age that we live in.8
The production of Life in a Day reflects a number of important shifts that have oc-
curred in recent years. As highlighted by the director, this film engages with changes
production and distribution. As smart phones have become more affordable—and
photo and video capabilities have improved—more people are making and sharing
their creative works online. The creators of the film harnessed this new potential for
global collaboration by sending mobile devices to developing countries.
Life in a Day also converses changes to viewing habits in a digital age. Increas-
ingly, productions are not being screened in cinemas or released on DVDs, but
broadcast on websites like YouTube, enabling users to contribute content, engage
with conversation threads, watch material anytime and anywhere using smart de-
vices, and re-distribute material. Macdonald sees the film as a metaphor for Internet
use, which involves ‘clicking from one place to another, in this almost random
way…following our own thoughts, following narrative and thematic paths.’9
The use of the Internet as a screening platform provides unprecedented levels
of access and exposure. Life in a Day has attracted more than 37 million viewers,
which is a phenomenal result for a non-traditional narrative film. The film also
demonstrates how digital artists and filmmakers are seeking alternative sources of
finance. While Life in a Day received support from the Sundance Institute and Na-
tional Geographic, it was made on a low budget and relied upon free input from
global contributors.
6 Kevin Macdonald, ‘Life in a Day’, <http://movies.nationalgeographic.com/movies/life-in-a-day/
about-the-production/>.
7 Kevin Macdonald, ‘Life in a Day’, <http://movies.nationalgeographic.com/movies/life-in-a-day/
about-the-production/>.
8 Kevin Macdonald, ‘Life in a Day’, <http://movies.nationalgeographic.com/movies/life-in-a-day/
about-the-production/>.
9 Rachel Dodes, ‘Life in a Day’ Director Aims to Elevate YouTube Videos Into Art’, The Wall
Street Journal, 22 July 2011, <http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/07/22/life-in-a-day-director-
kevin-macdonald-aims-to-elevate-youtube-videos-into-art/>, 2011, (accessed 12 August 2013).
Social and Political Effectiveness 133
In marketing the film, the team used blogs and social media to raise awareness
through free word-of-mouth publicity.10 In these ways, Life in a Day highlights new
forms of global communications, online collaboration, and the production and shar-
ing of creative works online. Macdonald claims that the film ‘could only be made
in the last five years because…you can get enough people who will have an under-
standing of how to shoot something.’11 This crowd-sourced work reflects new levels
of connectivity and understandings of how mobile devices can be used to produce
content. Life in a Day encourages contemplation of the relationship between glo-
balisation and digitisation, while offering viewers the opportunity to engage with
global social and political issues.
Social and Political Effectiveness
The social and political effectiveness of online expression is often questioned. Do
they achieve social and political change in the physical world? Or, do they simply
begin conversations, but leave problems unresolved? Life in a Day clearly encour-
ages contemplation of social justice issues such as economic hardship and politi-
cal inequity. The juxtaposition of advantage and disadvantage is powerfully high-
lighted by the variant responses to the question ‘what do you have in your pocket?’
While the film does not offer solutions or clear means for viewers to take action, it
still serves an important function as a conversation starter.
While there may not be clear avenues for viewers to take action on the issues
raised, online works such as this can raise awareness, educate viewers, and rally
individuals to pursue social and political causes, through sparking conversations
that have been excluded or dropped from public discussion. As a creative platform,
digital art can also provide some freedom of expression, and the capacity to engage
with contentious topics not addressed by governments or the mainstream Press.
News agencies and politicians, however, sometimes take up these issues, once cre-
ative works have highlighted or public interest. Taskforce 350.org recently criti-
cised MSN NBC and the US government for only tackling the controversial topic
of climate change, once the topic was trending online.12
10 Tim Partridge, ‘Life in a Day’, Google: Official Blog, 6 July 2010, <http://googleblog.blogspot.
com.au/2010/07/life-in-day.html>, 2010, (accessed 11 August 2013).
11 Rachel Dodes, ‘Life in a Day’, <http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/07/22/life-in-a-day-direc-
tor-kevin-macdonald-aims-to-elevate-youtube-videos-into-art/>.
12 350.org Facebook Page, <https://www.facebook.com/350.org>, (accessed 11 August, 2013).
134 8 Digital Art and Social Engagement
Fig. 8.3 Ibrahim Hamdan,
Images of Revolution, 2011.
(http://www.aljazeera.com/
programmes/aljazeera-
world/2011/10/
2011101974451215541.html)
Ibrahim Hamdan: Images of Revolution
A film that more powerfully engages with social and political issues is Ibrahim
Hamdan’s 2011 documentary Images of Revolution.13 The work was commissioned
by news station Al Jazeera. It was broadcast on the agency’s website and uploaded
on to various websites such as YouTube and Daily Motion. The film explores the
role that everyday people played in exposing the hardships of living under regimes
in the Arab world. In the opening sequence of the film, political analyst Ali al-
Bouazizi offers the statement that ‘[i]mages are like weapons. They can help topple
a regime.’ (Fig. 8.3).14
The central premise of Hamdan’s film is that films, images and messages that
people shared on social media sites impelled the revolutions of the 2011 Arab
Spring. In making the film, Hamdan interviewed some of the people whose content
was uploaded onto sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Their posts offered
the rest of the world glimpses inside countries such as Tunisia and Egypt, as revo-
lutions took place on the streets. The sharing of messages, video and photographs
sparked global dialogues and enabled some of those oppressed citizens in other
parts of the world to unite and also seek empowerment.
Criticism of Online Campaigns
The effectiveness of digital works and their commentaries is often debated. Some
critics claim that the role of social media during the Arab Spring was overstated and
misrepresented levels of political discontent. As Ramesh Srinivasan writes in his ar-
ticle ‘Taking power through technology in the Arab Spring’, one criticism of social
13 Ibrahim Hamdan, ‘Images of Revolution’, <http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeerawo
rld/2011/10/2011101974451215541.html>.
14 Ibrahim Hamdan, ‘Images of Revolution’, <http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeerawo
rld/2011/10/2011101974451215541.html>.
Digital Media as a Social Barometer 135
media is that it ‘often “makes real” that which may not exist for most or any’.15
Online campaigns often only reveal the views of a limited sector of the population,
which can give a false sense of popular opinion.
Equally, online campaigns are sometimes as means for venting, rather than plat-
forms for effecting real change in the physical world. In his blog ‘Losing Interest
in Social Media: There is no there there’, George Siemens criticises writers like
Jeff Jarvis for suggesting that a hashtag is ‘the equivalent of a power movement’.16
Siemens states:
[t]he notion that hashtag = power or the no one owns a hashtag appeal to power and fairness
is absolute and utter nonsense…Sure, it’s a good avenue to vent personal feelings and blow
off steam. However, that is not a “movement” and it doesn’t influence policy. The notion of
the Arab Spring being about social media is similarly misguided.17
Siemens argues that while social media enable us to connect and share information,
they are essentially secondary media. ‘The enormous and complex problems faced
by different societies around the world’, Siemens writes, ‘will not be solved by twit-
ter, G+, or social media.’18
Digital Media as a Social Barometer
The extent to which digital media brought about the events of the Arab Spring is
debated. While the scale of its influence may be questioned, it arguably still had a
role to play. Looking specifically at Egypt, digital media enabled activists to com-
municate with each other and the rest of the world, and gave everyday people a plat-
form to voice their concerns. According to research conducted by Zeynep Tufekci
and Christopher Wilson claim that nearly half of those surveyed found about the
demonstrations in Egypt through word-of-mouth communication, with only 28.3 %
finding out via Facebook. The authors concluded that ‘traditional mass media were
far less important for information people about the protest than were more interper-
sonal means of communication (face-to-face, telephone, or Facebook).’19 In gaining
information about the protests, the first participants in the demonstrations relied
upon ‘interpersonal forms of media over the mass media.’20
15 Ramesh Srinivasan, ‘Taking power through technology in the Arab Spring’, Al Jazeera, <http://
www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/09/2012919115344299848.html>, (accessed 26 Oct 2012).
16 George Siemens, ‘Losing Interest in Social Media: There is no There There’, eLearnspace,
<http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2011/07/30/losing-interest-in-social-media-there-is-no-there-
there/>, 2011, (accessed 11 August 2013).
17 George Siemens, ‘Losing Interest in Social Media <http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2011/07/30/
losing-interest-in-social-media-there-is-no-there-there/>.
18 George Siemens, ‘Losing Interest in Social Media <http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2011/07/30/
losing-interest-in-social-media-there-is-no-there-there/>.
19 Zeynep Tufekci and Christopher Wilson, ‘Social Media and the Decision to Participate in Political
Protest: Observations From Tahrir Square’, Journal of Communication, Vol. 62., 2012, p. 370.
20 Zeynep Tufekci and Christopher Wilson, ‘Social Media and the Decision to Participate in Political
Protest: Observations From Tahrir Square’, p. 370.
136 8 Digital Art and Social Engagement
According to Tufekci and Wilson, digital content production was high during
the Egyptian revolutions. Approximately half of those surveyed had made or shared
films and photographs of the events online, with Facebook being the main platform
for distribution.21 Almost half of those surveyed made or shared digital content,
which made it difficult for the government or state run media channels to conceal
information about the demonstrations. Tufekci and Wilson argue that ‘[i]f that pro-
portion was applied to even the most conservative estimates of total participation
in the Tahrir Square demonstrations, it becomes apparent that at least tens, if not
hundreds of thousands of people were documenting the protests.’22
Social media had an important role to play during the Egyptian revolutions. It en-
abled everyday people to act as ‘citizen journalists’—capturing events occurring on
the streets and sharing content with the rest of the world. To this end, digital media
operated as a popular barometer that captured levels of discontent, augmented mass
protests and helped bring down a regime. Contrary to opposing accounts, Tufekci
and Wilson claim that ‘[i]n the case of protests in Egypt, it appears that social net-
works, often mediated through the new online platforms in the emergent networked
public sphere, played a crucial role.’23
Achieving Social and Political Change
Ibrahim Hamdan engages with this idea in his film Images of Revolution. As a
journalist, he felt it was important to show how during the Arab Spring, everyday
citizens captured instances of social and political injustice. In the opening sequence
of the film, we are introduced to a young Tunisian woman who captured the shoot-
ing of a Syrian man shouting ‘the great Tunisian people will never die’24 down on
the street. She claims ‘I expected my video to become popular only in Tunisia or on
Facebook, I never imagined it would be shown so many times on TV channels.’ She
talks about her friends’ surprise that ‘an ordinary person took these extraordinary
pictures.’ (Fig. 8.4).25
As lawyer and activist Abdul Nasser Ouaini states,
the people of Tunisia created their own media tools with their mobile phones and small
cameras. They succeeded in publicising their cause and tragedy to the entire world. Those
21 Zeynep Tufekci and Christopher Wilson, ‘Social Media and the Decision to Participate in Political
Protest: Observations From Tahrir Square’, p. 370.
22 Zeynep Tufekci and Christopher Wilson, ‘Social Media and the Decision to Participate in Political
Protest: Observations From Tahrir Square’, p. 370.
23 Zeynep Tufekci and Christopher Wilson, ‘Social Media and the Decision to Participate in Political
Protest: Observations From Tahrir Square’, p. 370.
24 Ibrahim Hamdan, ‘Images of Revolution’, <http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeerawo
rld/2011/10/2011101974451215541.html>.
25 Ibrahim Hamdan, ‘Images of Revolution’, <http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeerawo
rld/2011/10/2011101974451215541.html>.
Achieving Social and Political Change 137
amateur images became like a news agency supplying international channels with pictures
from Tunisia.’26
The footage captured by these ‘citizen journalists’ gave face to the conflict in Syria.
Personal testimonies provided the rest of the world with ways of understanding a
macro political situation. The photographs, videos and comments posted by every-
day people provided visual access to unreachable regions, in places such as Syria.
Because much of the footage was shot in a transferable digital format, it enabled
content to be re-posted on social media sites and picked up by media agencies
around the world. A new relationship emerged between traditional news agencies
and citizen journalists.
The sharing of digital content via social media sites also allowed citizens to ad-
dress topics that were either too localised or contentious for state run news agencies
to address. Many citizen journalists drew attention to social and political injustices,
such as the covered up killing of Khaled Mohammed Said by Egyptian police.27
Through boldly engaging with these contentious topics, they challenged the au-
thority of the regime. Srinivasan believes that digital technology enabled citizens
to take power in Egypt. 28 Firstly, it allowed people to infiltrate the state-run mass
media. He states that while ‘domestic corporate media channels are self-serving and
26 Ibrahim Hamdan, ‘Images of Revolution’, <http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeerawo
rld/2011/10/2011101974451215541.html>.
27 Khaled Said Facebook Page, <https://www.facebook.com/pages/Khaled-Said/100792
786638349>, (accessed 11 August 2013).
28 Ramesh Srinivasan, ‘Taking power through technology in the Arab Spring’, <http://www.aljazeera.
com/indepth/opinion/2012/09/2012919115344299848.html>.
Fig. 8.4 Ibrahim Hamdan,
Images of Revolution, 2011.
(http://www.aljazeera.com/
programmes/aljazeera-
world/2011/10/
2011101974451
215541.html)
138 8 Digital Art and Social Engagement
volatile in their coverage’,29 during the Arab Spring activists posted transferable
digital content online, which was then republished by international news agencies.
Arguably, Egyptian activists saw the connection between street protests with online
action. They showed how when digital media campaigns work well, they augment
physical action rather than seeking to replace it.
One of the challenges, however, is to keep abreast of changes to technology and
how it can be used. Srinivasan writes that activists ‘need to discover new tools that
can continue to influence the political environment.’30 He cites the example of Hos-
sam Hamalawy, an activist and blogger for the Revolutionary Socialists. Hamalawy
described to him how a website could function as a means to create networks and
organise protests in real-time. However, Srinivasan also notes that ‘[t]echnologies
to spy, hack, and leak are all part of the environment’,31 meaning that digital media
is not just a domain for liberal youth or left leaning activists, but militaries, govern-
ments and regimes.
Lara Baladi: Alone, Together…In Media Res
Lara Baladi, 2012 video installation Alone, Together…In Media Res explores the
impacts of the Egyptian revolution of 25 January 2011 across three video channels.
Baladi is an Egyptian-Lebanese artist that was born in Beirut and spent her child-
hood in Cairo and Paris. She returned to Egypt in 1997 where she now resides. Her
art has been exhibited internationally and features film, photography, collage and
tapestries. She takes her influences from international cultures that she has expe-
rienced. Baladi’s sound installation Borg el Amal (translated as Tower of Hope),
was awarded the 2008/2009 Grand Nile Award at the Cairo Biennale. Baladi also
co-founded two projects during the Arab Spring: Radio Tahrir and Tahrir Cinema.
According to the artists, ‘[b]oth initiatives were inspired and informed by the 18
days that toppled Mubarak’s leadership,’32 with Tahrir Cinema enabling citizens to
share films that would document the Egyptian revolution (Fig. 8.5).
Alone, Together…In Media Res features three LCD screens, which bombard the
viewer with videos from the Egyptian uprising, as well as content from other revo-
lutions. The installation emulates the saturation of imagery that occurred, as news
agencies reported on the events and citizen journalists posted content online. As
a work in progress, Alone, Together…In Media Res effectively captures the flux
29 Ramesh Srinivasan, ‘Taking power through technology in the Arab Spring’, <http://www.aljazeera.
com/indepth/opinion/2012/09/2012919115344299848.html>.
30 Ramesh Srinivasan, ‘Taking power through technology in the Arab Spring’, <http://www.aljazeera.
com/indepth/opinion/2012/09/2012919115344299848.html>.
31 Ramesh Srinivasan, ‘Taking power through technology in the Arab Spring’, <http://www.aljazeera.
com/indepth/opinion/2012/09/2012919115344299848.html>.
32 Lara Baladi, ‘Alone, Together…Tahrir Two Years Later,’ <http://creativetimereports.
org/2013/01/25/tahrir-revolution-in-media-res/>, Creative Time Reports, 25 January 2013, (accessed
11 August 2013).
Social and Political Engagement 139
and uncertainty of Egypt’s political situation, while suggesting that the social is-
sues raised by the Tahrir Square protestors still require resolve. Importantly, the
installation also functions as a record, documenting and archiving footage that may
become lost within the Internet’s web, once the revolution was no longer deemed
‘newsworthy’. As Dorothea Schoene argues in her critique of Baladi’s art, ‘[w]hile
the Internet as an archive is a vast and rich source of information, it is also danger-
ously ephemeral and unstable: documents, photos or films discovered once, may be
deleted the very next moment and lost forever’.33
Social and Political Engagement
Alone, Together…In Media Res was borne of the project Vox Populi (The Voice
of the People), which and collated archived posts, articles, photographs and films
uploaded by everyday people during the 2011 Tahrir Square protests. Baladi was
motivated to create the installation because two years on, she felt that the aims of
the activists remain unfulfilled. Equally, she believes that Tahrir Square has ‘lost
much of its impact as a public space for changing history.’34 To this end, the artwork
seeks to identify and locate the ways in which citizens have sought freedom, across
the course of history. The title: Alone, Together…In Media Res means ‘in the midst
of things’ in Latin. It refers to the individual actions of citizens, as well as the senses
of solidarity that come from collaborating online and aligning with revolutionary
thinkers and actors from other moments in time.
During the revolution, Baladi relied upon the Internet for news and updates,
since she did not own a television. Social media sites in particular, enabled everyday
33 Dorothea Schoene, ‘Beyond The Image’, <http://www.ibraaz.org/projects/40#author96>.
34 Lara Baladi, ‘Alone, Together…Tahrir Two Years Later,’ <http://creativetimereports.
org/2013/01/25/tahrir-revolution-in-media-res/>.
Fig. 8.5 Lara Baladi, Alone, Together…In Media Res, 2012. (3 channel video installation, 42 min,
Egypt, 2012 in Dorothea Schoene, ‘Beyond The Image: A Project By Lara Baladi’, Contemporary
Visual Culture In North Africa and The Middle East, http://www.ibraaz.org/projects/40#author96)
140 8 Digital Art and Social Engagement
people to network and organise, share their stories and report on events taking place
in their communities. As Rhona Wells asserts, in reference to art from the Middle
East, ‘[s]ocial media, perhaps thanks to the international and domestic hype, has a
cache in Egypt that it did not have before the events of 2011. These technologies,
seen as Modern and ‘liberating, have been embraced by many throughout Egypt’s
population, including by those without a computer or Internet access.’35 To this end,
they acted as citizen journalists providing up-to-date information on the revolution.
In documenting the protests and offering a chronology of events, Alone, Together…
In Media Res serves a similar role.
In making the film, Baladi searched online sites such as YouTube and selected
footage that echoed the sentiments of the Egyptian revolution. In her searches, she
focussed upon themes such as democracy, violence against women, censorship,
brutality and suppression. Baladi also researched messages posted by activists on
Twitter using the #Jan25 hashtag, noting that
[a]s the political tension grew, more and more images and videos of a packed Tahrir Square
were uploaded to YouTube and other websites. They echoed footage from other uprisings
across the Middle East and North Africa, as well as the sights and sounds of a vast array of
past social movements. It was as though Sartre was protesting with us in Tahrir.36
Baladi also uses the three video channels to create connections and juxtapositions
that provide frameworks for locating the events in broader social and political terms.
Social and Political Effectiveness
In making her installation, Baladi wanted to discover what has motivated people
to revolt throughout history. She incorporates a speech by Jean Paul Sartre, for ex-
ample, which was used to motivate striking car manufacturers in France. She also
includes images from other iconic revolutions, as well as banned cartoons, iconic
photographs, political graffiti and statements by activist groups such as Greenpeace.
To this end, Baladi manages to ‘find and define the archetypes within historical
processes, which reflect the embedded quality in humans to search for freedom.’37
As Baladi searched for content online, she discovered the video Tiananmen-Like
Courage in Cairo: Egypt’s 25 Jan Protests.38 The short film was shot on a mobile
phone and uploaded onto YouTube, where it went viral. The film features a man
standing defiantly in front of a police water cannon, trying to block its path. Doro-
thea Schoene interviewed the artist and believed that the film was included because
35 Rhona Wells, ‘The Future of a Promise’, Middle East, Issue 428, Dec 2011, p. 60.
36 Lara Baladi, ‘Alone, Together…Tahrir Two Years Later,’ <http://creativetimereports.
org/2013/01/25/tahrir-revolution-in-media-res/>.
37 Dorothea Schoene, ‘Beyond The Image’, <http://www.ibraaz.org/projects/40#author96>.
38 WilyawilDotCom, ‘Tiananmen-Like Courage in Cairo: Egypt’s 25 Jan Protests’, YouTube,
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1m4_q_HP5o>, (accessed 1 February 2013).
Art and Environmentalism 141
‘[t]he strong symbolic gestures and iconography in the video successfully paralleled
two major uprisings of the last few decades.’39
Some critics argue that it is too early to be making art about the Arab Spring.
In reflecting upon artworks exhibited at the 2012 Art Dubai fair, Laura U. Marks
claimed ‘[i]t is too soon after Tahrir Square to make art: an indisputable consensus.’40
She discussed one work in particular, Isak Berbic’s 2011 film Battle for Petra, in
which the artist transformed television footage of the Arab Spring into a Ben Hur
inspired battle scene. Marks writes that [t]his work, casting protestors and police as
gladiators, was so disrespectful it took my breath away.41
However, Baladi’s, installation neither simplifies of trivialises the events of 25
January 2011, but provides a rich framework for viewers to locate and contextualise
the protests in broader social and political terms. She considers her installation as
‘documentation of a revolution in the digital age, and watching the virtual world
turn into reality’.42 This is an important statement, as it points to the artist’s aware-
ness of the need for online campaigns to augment physical action, if they are to
effect real social and political change. As the events of the Arab Spring continue to
unravel, we might begin to believe in what Wells terms ‘the promise of visual cul-
ture in an age that has become increasingly disaffected with politics as a means of
social engagement.’43 But for some critics such as Marks, wonder who should have
the ability to represent these realities.44
Art and Environmentalism
In her article ‘The Art of Activism: Painting The Faces of Social and Climate
Change’, Kimberley Mok writes that ‘[a]rt can be a powerful tool for social change,
disseminating ideas and inspiring people to act together.’45 She refers to a recent
series of works exhibited as part of Oxfam America’s exhibition Climate Change
on Campus, which sought to bring ‘art, activism and concern for climate change
together for an exhibition at December’s UN Conference of Parties meeting in
Poznan, Poland.’46 Increasingly, world artists are engaging with issues of climate
39 Dorothea Schoene, ‘Beyond The Image’, <http://www.ibraaz.org/projects/40#author96>.
40 Laura U. Marks, ‘Moving Images’, Afterimage, Vol. 40 Issue 1, 2012, p. 5.
41 Laura U. Marks, ‘Moving Images’, p. 5.
42 Lara Baladi, ‘Alone, Together…Tahrir Two Years Later,’ <http://creativetimereports.
org/2013/01/25/tahrir-revolution-in-media-
43 Rhona Wells, ‘The Future of a Promise’, p. 60.
44 Laura U. Marks, ‘Moving Images.’
45 Kimberley Mok, ‘The Art of Activism: Painting The Faces of Social and Climate Change’,
Treehugger, <http://www.treehugger.com/culture/the-art-of-activism-painting-the-faces-of-social-
climate-change.html>, (accessed 13 February 2013).
46 Kimberley Mok, ‘The Art of Activism’, <http://www.treehugger.com/culture/the-art-of-activ-
ism-painting-the-faces-of-social-climate-change.html>.
142 8 Digital Art and Social Engagement
change, environmental degradation and the impacts upon people living in devel-
oped and third world countries. Some are using their art to raise awareness of issues,
but to also help bring about change through donating profits from sales to environ-
mental organisations and encouraging online audiences to support worthy causes or
support political candidates and agencies addressing climate change.
One such artist is Seattle-based digital photographer, Chris Jordan. The lawyer
turned artist has used human detritus—ranging from oil barrels to plastic bottles and
discarded Barbie™ dolls—to comment upon the impacts of waste and consump-
tion upon the environment. He uses physical objects to represent concerning and
perhaps incomprehensible statistics. Jordan’s series include: Intolerable Beauty:
Portraits of American Mass Consumption (2003–2006), In Katrina’s Wake: Por-
traits of Loss From an Unnatural Disaster (2005), Running The Numbers I: An
American Self Portrait (2006-current), Running the Numbers II: Portraits of Global
Mass Culture (2009–2010) and Midway: Message from the Gyre (2009-current).
The provocative titles highlight the artist’s concern with human consumption, social
inequity and environmental devastation.
Jordan’s website provides links to supporting articles and resources, which pro-
vides critical contexts for engaging with his works. In an interview with Simon
Preuss, Jordan reflects upon audience experiences of his art. He claims that
seen from a distance, the images are like something else, maybe totally boring pieces of
Modern art. On closer view, the visitor has an almost unpleasant experience with the art-
work. It’s almost like a magic trick; inviting people to a conversation that they didn’t want
to have in the first place.47
Jordan’s artworks are deliberately provocative, designed to make real incompre-
hensible statistics and perhaps motivate audiences to change their habits for the
betterment of the environment.
Chris Jordan, Midway: Message from the Gyre
One of Jordan’s most powerful art series is Midway: Message from the Gyre. This
series—commenced in 2009 and currently ongoing—documents the devastating ef-
fects of Western consumption upon a population of albatrosses. The carcasses of
dozens of birds are photographed, with plastic caps and other discarded objects
embedded within the remains. What is tragic about this work is that Midway Atoll is
more than 2000 miles from any civilisation and is therefore meant to provide a sanc-
tuary to these creatures. Instead, human waste that washes into the atoll is mistaken
as food and fed to the chicks. In an article in the Huffington Post, Stiv J. Wilson
claims that Jordan’s images ‘were often dismissed by critics as “photoshopped” or
47 Simone Preuss, ‘An Interview with Photographic Artist Chris Jordan’, Environmental Graf-
fiti, 2008, <http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/featured/interview-photographic-artist-chris-
jordan/11408>, (accessed 15 February 2013).
143
Chris Jordan, Midway: Message from the Gyre
altered’ in some way because of the sheer, unbelievable amounts of plastics inside
their bodies (Fig. 8.6).48
On his website, he writes that ‘kneeling over their carcasses is like looking into
a macabre mirror’.49 Like Unsinkable, the series Midway: Message from the Gyre
provides a lens for us to reflect upon our patterns of consumption, and to see their
direct impacts upon the environment. As Jordan states,
These birds reflect back an appallingly emblematic result of the collective trance of our
consumerism and runaway industrial growth. Like the albatross, we first-world humans
find ourselves lacking the ability to discern anymore what is nourishing from what is toxic
to our lives and our spirits.50
48 Stiv J. Wilson, ‘Dead Plastic Filled Birds’, Huffington Post, <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
stiv-j-wilson/dead-plastic-filled-birds_b_638716.html>, (accessed 15 February 2013).
49 Chris Jordan, Midway: Message from the Gyre, <http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/
midway/#about>, (accessed 15 February 2013).
50 Chris Jordan, Midway: Message from the Gyre, <http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/
midway/#about>.
Fig. 8.6 Forest and Kim
Starr, Habit with Laysan
Albatross Chicks and Marine
Debris, 2008. (http://www.
starrenvironmental.com/
images/image/?q=080603-
5640&o=plants)
144 8 Digital Art and Social Engagement
Jordan is said to have experienced great trauma during his trip, and depression for
some time after.51 He stated: ‘I was like Dante, entering hell, but thought eventu-
ally I would come out the other side. The problem is, I never came out.’.52 Jordan
emotionally spoke about the Midway Atoll and what he described as the ‘problem
of unconscious collective behaviour’,53 and during his 2008 TED presentation. He
claimed ‘we’ve lost our outrage and our anger and our grief’,54 having become
desensitized to such traumatic events. Yet, as Helen Walters observed, [‘h]e clearly
wasn’t wagging his finger or blaming or preaching, rather trying to combat what he
described as “the anaesthesia” prevalent in contemporary culture within the United
States.55
Active Art
Chris Jordan’s art offers more than passive viewing experiences. Like Life in a Day,
Jordan uses his website to foster active engagement and participation, by providing
critical contexts as well as means for individuals to comment or take action on the
issues presented. Jordan uses his website to provide critical contexts for viewing the
works, raise awareness of key issues, establish and report on milestones, and offer
avenues for audiences to support the cause.
To complement this art series, Jordan is also working on the film Midway, which
is due for release in 2013. The film will be a collaborative work involving the artists
Bill Weaver, Jan Vozenilek, Victoria Sloan Jordan, and Manuel Maqueda. The film
will have limited narration and instead use video, photography and poetry to allow
each artist to personally respond. According to a website for the film, the docu-
mentary will use limited narration and instead allow spectacular images to show
the extent of the degradation of the environment. High-definition cinematography
will present ‘stunning juxtapositions of beauty and horror, destruction and renewal,
grief and joy, birth and death’, with the aim being to shift viewer’s perspectives on
environmental protection and their practices of consumption. Functioning as both
‘elegy and warning the film explores the interconnectedness of species, with the
51 Stiv J. Wilson, ‘Dead Plastic Filled Birds’, <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stiv-j-wilson/dead-
plastic-filled-birds_b_638716.html>.
52 Stiv J. Wilson, ‘Dead Plastic Filled Birds’, <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stiv-j-wilson/dead-
plastic-filled-birds_b_638716.html>.
53 Chris Jordan, ‘Turning Powerful Stats into Art’, <http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_jordan_pic-
tures_some_shocking_stats.html>, TED, 2008, (accessed 5 August 2013).
54 Chris Jordan, ‘Turning Powerful Stats into Art’, <http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_jordan_pic-
tures_some_shocking_stats.html>.
55 Helen Walters, ‘First Tears at TED’, Bloomberg Business week, 28 February 2008, <http://www.
businessweek.com/innovate/next/archives/2008/02/first_tears_at.html>, 2008, (accessed 15 Feb-
ruary 2013).
Conclusion 145
albatross on Midway as a mirror of out humanity.’56 Several times on his website,
Jordan refers to the albatross in mythical terms, viewing it as a symbolic metaphor
for the environment and man’s impact upon it.
The film Midway is being financed through private donations and sponsorship
from the not-for-profit artist organisation Fractured Atlas, which suggests means for
artists to raise the revenue to make art. On the Midway website there is a plea for
viewers to donate to the project and take action on the environmental issues raised.
The film also has a blog, which allows the artists to directly communicate with
viewers and encourage them to take action. In addition, Midway has its own You-
Tube channel as well as a presence on Flickr, Facebook, Livestream and Twitter. The
project provides multiple means for users to become informed as well as involved
in the environmental campaign to save the Midway Atoll.
Conclusion
Increasingly, artists are using digital media to shape social and political agendas. All
of the artworks discussed in this chapter seek to effect some kind positive change.
Life in a Day and Alone, Together…In Med Res explore events that were not always
covered by the mainstream media. Much of the West’s awareness of social and po-
litical injustices—such as the murder of Egyptian citizen Khaled Said by police—
came from ‘citizen journalists’ who, like these artists, used connective media to
document the events online. While Images of Revolution alludes to digital media’s
role in implementing social and political change, Alone, Together…In Media Res
goes further in suggesting that digital art serves an important role, as a means for
communicating controversial ideas.
While Hamdan and Macdonald use the Internet media to distribute their art,
Baladi and Jordan offer modified versions of their works online. To this end, these
works engage with online social and political commentary, and serve similar func-
tions themselves: operating as platforms for launching and continuing conversations
about issues such as global living conditions, economic disparity, political inequity,
censorship and restrictions on freedom, and individual and collective uprising. By
virtue of being published online, each of the artworks discussed in this chapter have
the capacity to transform passive viewers into active users that can converse with
artists and comment upon works, ‘liking’ or ‘disliking’ them, and following links
posted on accompanying websites to further engage with the topics raised.
This is powerfully shown in Midway: Message from the Gyre and Life in a Day,
which uses associated websites and social media channels to encourage users to
support political and environmental campaigns. As a crowd-sourced work, Life in
a Day also invites enables users to become part of the production process, and
personally explore social issues such as poverty and environmental change more
56 Chris Jordan, ‘Midway Film’, <http://www.midwayfilm.com/about.html>, Midway Film, (ac-
cessed 18 February 2013).
146 8 Digital Art and Social Engagement
personally. Equally, the websites for Midway: Message from the Gyre and the Mid-
way film encourage users to reflect upon their own patterns of consumption. These
sites provide links to supporting articles, affiliated organizations and current cam-
paigns, and invite users to become involved in the conversations broached by their
art.
However, the question remains: can digital art effect social and political change
in the physical world? Certainly, only those with digital access and literacy, a social
media presence, and an interest in the topics presented will engage with the artists’
campaigns. But the advantage of online action is that it allows for the wider spread
of ideas, beyond local contexts. The sharing of art online enables dialogues to not
just be initiated but continued, through facilitating two-way communication chan-
nels between makers and users.
Arguably, when online campaigns work well, they complement and augment
physical action. This can be achieved through linked websites, blogs or social media
sites that encourage audiences to join rallies, lobby governments, donate money to
worthy causes, sign petitions, change their behaviours or opinions, or push for in-
ternational agreements on issues such as climate change or child poverty. To bring
about actual changes in the physical world, however, arguably artists need to pro-
vide something more than a passive viewing experience. As this chapter has shown,
the most powerful works are harnessing the connective and participatory tools of
digital media to transform passive spectators into active users.
In the digital age, the notion of social responsibility takes on new meaning. With
new opportunities for information sharing and global action, those with social and
political empowerment might use digital media to try and bring positive change.
The globalisation of media offers users unprecedented levels of access to different
part of the world. Yet, as we become aware of the difficulties faced by others, we are
faced with new questions regarding our social responsibility. Do those of us with
political freedom and social empowerment have an obligation to lend our support?
As some by all of the artists in this chapter, surely the answer is ‘yes’.
147
Chapter 9
Conclusion: Digital Art as a Platform
of Articulation
M. Langdon, The Work of Art in a Digital Age: Art, Technology and Globalisation,
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4939-1270-4_9, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Introduction
This book has shown how digital art can enable globalisation to be experienced
on an individual level. Through an examination of diverse case studies, it has re-
vealed how digital art can act as a critical voice that encourages dialogues centred
on individual experience and response. Through iterative conversations, this text
has explored how globalisation and digital art can ‘speak’ to each other, and provide
ways of seeing each phenomenon as an experiential, particular and essentially hu-
man construct (Fig. 9.1).
A concern about universal and binary articulations of globalisation seemed to
necessitate a more particular approach. While not discounting the value of macro
analyses for general studies, positivist articulations can be problematic, particularly
when applied to the realm of experience. Deterministic frameworks can negate the
dynamic, contingent and ephemeral elements of human response. As discussed in
Chap. 2 with reference to macro accounts of globalisation, and in Chap. 3 with
regards to technological determinist constructions of digital art, positivist affirma-
tions tend to be at the expense of particular difference. The contrary responses to
globalisation expressed by the digital artists explored in this book, seem to negate
the value and applicability of universal discourses.
From the radical art of ®™ark and the Yes Men through to Chris Jordan’s Mid-
way: Message from the Gyre, this book has shown how artists are using different
tools and techniques to convey globalisation’s impacts. Works such as iCinema’s
T_Visionarium and de Nijs’ Beijing Accelerator illuminate the fluid and indeter-
minate qualities of globalisation, while challenging the traditional limits and con-
ventions of art. In generating affective experiences centred upon touch, interaction
and response, these artists offer new means of articulating globalisation and art, as
evolving, experiential constructs.
To make this text more approachable, each chapter approached globalisation and
digital art in terms of particular themes. In Chap. 5, for example, spatial, temporal
and kinetic impacts were discussed. In Chap. 6, globalisation was explored in terms
of specific urban sites. The arrangement of case studies also reflected an historical
148 9 Conclusion: Digital Art as a Platform of Articulation
progression in the production of digital art. The ordering was designed to illuminate
shifts in the thinking about globalisation, as well as stylistic developments within
the field of digital art. From the discussion of reactionary net.art in Chap. 4, to the
critique of individuating technology in Chap. 5, and the affective Metropolis films
explored in Chap. 6, this book has conversed with new levels of nuance and grada-
tion in evolving digital art practice and criticism. In reflecting upon the socially
engaged artworks discussed in Chap. 8, it is predicted that future artists will take
advantage of emerging haptic, mobile, analytical and locational technologies, to
create new commentaries that locate digital art in terms of its times.
Digital Art as Art
A further objective of this book was to provide grounds for locating and understand-
ing digital artworks as art. It contended that digital art is art by virtue of its innova-
tive re-orientations of media and messages in dialogue with cultural contexts and
external phenomena like globalisation. Some of the pieces explored explicitly ques-
tioned the nature of art, and tested its limits. Chapter 2 for example, discussed digi-
tal art in terms of attention economies. In Chap. 4, Ross Mawdsley and ®™ark’s
critique of commercialisation was examined, as was their satirical description of
themselves as a corporate entity rather than a group of artists.1 The chapter also
engaged with The Yes Men’s radical campaigns, described as ‘hijinks’. Their resis-
tance to established concepts of art reveals, as Stallabrass observes, that ‘the very
notions of greatness and of timeless masterpieces do not sit comfortably with an art
so dependent upon and responding to fast-changing technology’.2
As discussed in Chap. 2, the denial of digital art as ‘art’ has much to do formal
notions of artistry, originality and authorship. We might question why digital art-
1 Julian Stallabrass, Internet Art, p. 137.
2 Julian Stallabrass, Internet Art, p. 143.
Fig. 9.1 Kevin Macdonald,
Life in a Day, National Geo-
graphic Films, 2011. (http://
movies.nationalgeographic.
com/movies/life-in-a-day/
about-the-production/)
149Digital Art as Art
ists continue to align themselves with the field of art. Critics might argue that this
is purely a pragmatic move, and claim that due to funding rules there is a need for
digital works to be deemed ‘artistic’ to gain revenue and exposure through gallery
acquisition. As Geert Lovink notes, ‘political climates in Western countries wildly
vary. Whereas e-culture funding in the Netherlands has gone up over the past years,
the situation in Berlin, Paris and London, for instance, remains bleak’.3
Looking to the future there remain unresolved questions about the formal display
and acquisition of digital art. These are complicated by the fact that many digital
works change their meaning or function when exhibited in gallery spaces. This
was the case with the works Can You See Me Now and Haptic Gloves, for exam-
ple, which lost some of their functionality when displayed at In the Line of Flight.
Clearly, the modification of an artwork to suit the physical, technical or economic
constraints of a gallery can force artists to make adverse alterations. There is also
the issue of galleries deliberately modifying works to make them more ‘understand-
able’ to mass audiences.
In seeking to locate digital art, Chap. 3 revealed how the articulation of the glo-
balisation in positivist terms might limit its affects. It explored the fluid discourses
of Appadurai, Enwezor, Augé, and Sassen, which challenge singular, universal and
alarmist accounts. In opposing the claim that globalisation’s ‘technoscapes’ are hos-
tile or desensitizing, this text explored works by artists such as Justine Cooper, who
uses digital media to generate soft and ‘feminine’ affects.
With reference to the work of iCinema, this book contemplated how global tech-
nologies could contribute to new forms of collaboration, production, display and
distribution. It revealed how digital technology could provide new opportunities for
artistic exchange, and lead to global exhibitions such as Metropolis and In the Line
of Flight. With art becoming increasingly globalised—supported by new flows of
information, ideology, finance, technology, and people—it was shown how tradi-
tional senses of art drawn from Modern Western traditions, may be losing their rel-
evance or applicability. Reiterating claims established in the Introduction, this book
argued for the expansion of the category to accommodate new expressive forms.
While digital art’s technical elements are unique, it has also been shown dem-
onstrated how new works converse with earlier art forms dialogues. Chapter 2 dis-
cussed earlier interventions in art and technology, and contextualised digital art in
terms of precedent styles such as Modern cinema. A case was made for viewing
digital expressions as ‘art’, and acknowledging its strong capacity to offer cultural
critiques of phenomena, such as globalisation.
Many of the uncertainties related to the conceptualisation, location, acquisition
and display of digital works, suggest a lack of understanding of how it relates to
the broader field of art. In his text Interzone, Darren Tofts reflects upon some of the
perceived issues with digital art, particularly the technological requirements, which
are not always fully accommodated by traditional galleries. Yet, rather than apply-
3 Geert Lovink,‘New Media, Art and Science: Explorations Beyond the Official Discourse’,
<http://laudanum.net/geert/files/1129753681/2005>, Laudanum, 2005, (accessed 16 December
2007). Link is no longer active.
150 9 Conclusion: Digital Art as a Platform of Articulation
ing the same expectations to analogue and digital works, Tofts suggest that different
approaches are required, as well as broader public education on how digital works
can function and be understood as art.4 While new spaces dedicated to digital art
are emerging—ranging from institutions such as the Australian Centre for the Mov-
ing Image to forums such as Rhizome5 dedicated to the theorising of digital art and
media.
Digital Media as a Humanising Technology
While there have been many attempts to ‘popularise’ and delimit globalisation—by
writers like Naomi Klein and Thomas Friedman6—there still remains the sense as
Mark K. Smith expresses, that ‘[m]uch of the talk of ‘globalization’ is confused
and confusing’.7 Similarly, as has been discussed, understandings of digital art’s
terminology, boundaries and location are also limited. However, alarmism and fear
have often reduced the understanding of globalisation and digitisation, with each
being variously described as alienating or as Sukomal Sen writes, ‘de-humanising
to the core’.8
However, throughout this book, universal and binary articulations of globali-
sation have been questioned. Technological Determinist and Alarmist approaches
were challenged on the grounds that they simplistically reduced the phenomenon.
To the contrary, many of the artists explored have shown how it is possible to have
contradictory reactions to globalisation, so that in one context it may be seen as lib-
erating, while in another viewed as oppressive. For example, Joanna Berzowska’s
tactile and sensory art that promotes intimacy and touch, revealed the limitations
of Baudrillard and Virilio’s thesis that new technologies de-humanise and discon-
nect. T_Visionarium also revealed how digital works could converse with individ-
ual bodies and senses, through immersive, interactive, and particular technologies.
The artists uncovered digital art’s sensual, connective and tactile qualities, chal-
lenging Baudrillard’s claims that simulatory media is de-sensitising.9 Finally, Lara
Baladi’s installation Alone, Together…In Media Res offered a conflicted account
of global technologies, in showing how the Internet could both liberate and repress
individuals.
4 Darren Tofts, Interzone, p. 133.
5 Rhizome, <http://www.rhizome.org>, (accessed 23 September 2007).
6 No author, ‘Thomas Friedman on Globalisation’, The Economist, 31 March 2005, <http://www.
economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3809512>, 2005, (accessed 3 November 2008).
7 Mark K. Smith, ‘Definitions of Globalization’, Informal Education Organisation, <http://www.
infed.org/biblio/defining_globalization.htm>, (accessed 3 November 2008).
8 Sukomal Sen, ‘The Fantasy of ‘Fair Globalisation’’, Counter Currents, 15 July 2008, <http://
www.countercurrents.org/gl-sen150704.htm>, 2008, (accessed 4 November 2008).
9 See: Baudrillard’s writings on digitisation’s simulation of reality in Jean Baudrillard, ‘From ‘Si-
mulcra and Simulations’’.
151Digital Media as a Humanising Technology
In terms of cultural commentary, it was argued that digital art could challenge
our perceptions of globalisation, as well as our sense of what art might be. Digital
art has the potential to offer unique articulations, through exploring and generating
differential responses and events. Chapter 6, for example, explored how Tom Otter-
ness uses simple animation in Nine Eleven to express complex feelings of trauma
and despair, in the wake of 11 September 2001. This difficult subject might have
been communicated far less powerfully, if it was not articulated through the emotive
platform of film. Human feelings cannot always be conveyed in linear text. Hyper,
sensory and non-linear formats can offer what Peter W. Foltz terms ‘associative
retrieval paths’,10 which are ‘similar to the way retrieval is performed from human
memory’.11
In presenting digital art as an individual form of cultural commentary, this book
has also engaged with affective response. As a sensory, subjective, and expressive
form of articulation, it highlighted how digital art can provide new means of ex-
pressing ‘felt’ responses. In relation to T_Visionarium and Beijing Accelerator, it
was shown how digital art can spatially, temporally and kinetically emulates glo-
balisation’s perceived impacts, and generate conflicting experiences. Feelings, for
example, that the world is closer or more dispersed; that life has sped up or slowed
down; that linear time has become more or less relevant in a global world. Artworks
that juxtaposed or contradicted one another were deliberately chosen. In Chap. 7,
for example, Jung Sin and Kaho Abe’s tactile Haptic Glove was discussed alongside
Starrs and Cmielewski’s Floating Territories, which featured hard gaming infra-
structure and controls. Through offering contrary expressions, this text problema-
tises universal approaches to globalisation and art.
The artworks presented in this book were historically, culturally and technically
diverse. Despite the diversity of formats explored, each case study offers a unique
understanding of what globalisation might mean, to individual people in particular
places or times. They highlighted the richness and variability of reactions to globali-
sation, while suggesting the value of digital art as an affective means of articulation.
While de Nijs’ treadmill in Run Motherfucker Run directly responds to users’ move-
ments, ®™ark’s forms of revolt encouraged users to take physical action. While
the Metropolis films lacked this level of interactivity, the focus upon personal testi-
mony in pieces such as Golebiewski’s This Is Where I Live re-centred discussions of
globalisation around individual memories, encounters and responses. In focussing
upon the local and private spaces of a global city, the artist offered a particularised
account. Equally, the dark and intimate theatre of the Metropolis exhibition emu-
lated the mental realm, drawing attention to the roles that memory, recollection and
reverie play in the formation of responses to globalisation.
10 Peter W. Foltz, ‘Comprehension, Coherence, and Strategies in Hypertext and Linear Text’, in
Jean-François Rouet (Ed.), Hypertext and Cognition, Mahwah, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,
1996, p. 110.
11 Peter W. Foltz, ‘Comprehension, Coherence, and Strategies in Hypertext and Linear Text’,
p. 110.
152 9 Conclusion: Digital Art as a Platform of Articulation
A progressive ordering of case studies, revealed more complex and nuanced cri-
tiques of globalisation’s affects within digital works. Chap. 4 focussed upon early
net.art examples, which provided ominous accounts of globalisation, and used less
subtle techniques. The use of ‘hard’ and non-tactile technologies produced limited
understandings of its variant affects. In Chaps. 5–8, however, it was shown how
new works were engaging with individual bodies and consciousnesses and in do-
ing so, generating more intricate responses to globalisation. With the benefit of
time, advancements in technology, and new critical understandings, Janet Murray’s
prediction that ‘a new narrative art will come into its own expressive form’12 was
being realised.
Looking Forward
In addressing the question posed in the Introduction of: what understandings of glo-
balisation can digital art provide?, this text has argued that digital art has the capac-
ity to offer affective expressions of globalisation, and promote understandings of
its physical and cognitive shifts. By creating a dialogue between globalisation and
digital art, this book has shown the difficulty of categorising human experiences.
This focus upon globalisation’s micro impacts provided new ways of ‘accessing’ a
phenomenon that is often viewed as confounding. Through a close engagement with
diverse case studies, new means for locating the self in terms of globalisation and
digital art were explored. The works raised different questions concerning cultural
identity, territory, connection, empowerment, individualism and morality.
This book has revealed how digital art can offer dynamic and polychromic ex-
pressions of globalisation through affective, responsive and immersive media. The
flexible languages afforded by digital art, connected with fluid constructions of
globalisation. Appadurai’s description of it as a series of human, ideological, media,
financial and technological flows, for example, framed the book’s approach. It has
emphasised the value of difference and divergence in the contextualisation of art
and globalisation, and revealed how digital art could overcome the constraints of
formal or schematic approaches. From the discussion of T_Visionarium’s interac-
tive narrative, through to the exploration of socially conscious works in Chap. 8,
this text has revealed digital art’s capacity to raise human and ontological questions.
Just as this work prompts consideration of globalisation, it also encourages con-
templation of what art is or may be, in a digital age. By using the term ‘digital art’,
digital expressions have been located within the realm of art, with their capacity
to be ‘artistic’ firmly acknowledged. While the disruption of traditional principles
has been discussed—particularly aura, originality, authorship and display—it has
shown how their reinterpretation or rejection, is often part of what ‘constitutes’
them as art. The subversion of Formalist ideals through replica, misappropriation
and crowd sourcing converses with earlier styles, such as Situationist art. Chapter 2
12 Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, p. 93.
153Looking Forward
illustrates how Post-Structuralist cinema and Modernist experiments in art and tech-
nology, similarly re-defined and expanded the category of art.
In conclusion, the aim of this text was to show how individual experience, in-
terpretation and affect are central to our understandings of art and globalisation.
When approached in these ways, both may be seen as phenomena defined by their
experiencers. Digital art in particular, is technically and discursively apposite to
both engage with and generate, sensory and particular responses. The conversations
created between digital art and globalisation throughout this work, have revealed
how both concepts can be accessed through affective understandings. As one of the
most important platforms of this age, digital art has the capacity to not just articu-
late—but also generate—individual responses to globalisation.
155
M. Langdon, The Work of Art in a Digital Age: Art, Technology and Globalisation,
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4939-1270-4, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Selected Bibliography
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of Politics and Politics of Culture: The Cultural and the Political in Latin American Social
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ANGELIL, M. On Architecture, the City and Technology, Cambridge, Mass., Butterworth, 1990.
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