Extracts from Willoughby Cunningham essay, 'Becoming Electric'. Commissioned by Interval to accompany Becoming Electric exhibition at The Lower Turks Head, Manchester, December, 2006 Even the most cursory glance at the contents of this exhibition reveals the curators care about the recognition of digital art as a serious art form. The overall installation and the sensibility of the works firmly bridge the gap between traditional modes of fine art and no longer appropriate notions of “New Media”. The works collectively state that we no longer live in a time when it is appropriate to define digital orientated artworks, whether in terms of subject matter or a technological means of delivery, with obsolete jargon. What was once considered avant-garde in digital art, and explored by artists a decade ago, is now a norm far beyond the art-world politic. Technological society’s general receptivity has caught up due to the widespread rise in the use of the web as a place to define new social spaces. In this context and inspired by the ever-growing sensibilities inherent in the growth of digital communicative technologies, Becoming Electric explores broad notions of social space and ‘Becoming’, stimulated by what are now widely used communicative tools. Social Software enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities. 2006 is definitely the year that YouTube, MySpace and all the others have come to the forefront. Whilst this is an interesting trend it is not only one that was accurately predicted but that has now reached massive proportions. The artwork selected for this show reflects a newer temperament, in that it can now explore itself in an environment of more communal understanding of the means. Its works are divergent in subject matter but as a mix all share a mature style and a focus. [........ ......] Another piece which relates newer technologies to old ones and reappropriation and has similar random collision effects is Dave Griffiths' You Cue (Cinema). Operating like a DVD menu or a web interface of sorts it plays selected 8 second clips of old films. We are prompted to select our next clip to play (labelled with categories of mood, such as threat, love, desire..) by the appearance of cue dots found in film, which once signalled the projectionist to change the reel, and significantly many scenes are zoomed in or cropped (perhaps avoiding any copyright issues?). The bombardment of image scraps, of sound costume and location, in a collectively understood filmic language demands our attention that we feel familiarity even without the traditional means of consumption. Again many narratives are attempted to be created, the one flaw, perhaps, is that one can create a strong sense of non-linear narrative, and at other times one just gets lost. From a consumer viewpoint the interface is unnecessarily hard to control. But the notions involved are sound as the work taps into the collective vault of digital source material (all of the clips are collected from free digital-TV broadcasts) evermore ready to be utilised. The idea of changing the meaning of something found is not new in art, and works like these ask serious questions that have yet to be answered: What values can be applied in judging an act of re-working film so that it can be considered something new and interesting, rather than a rehash of something that held its own completeness, that is merely being copied? You are the judge but a work such as this provokes that discussion. [.... ...] It is excellent to see an exhibition that reflects that the sensibility of the audience has moved on, not in that the work itself cannot wow so easily by mere tech alone, but in that it has no need too. Having lost some of its spectacular power, one is left to ponder it on its own terms. As such it superbly examines where digital artwork is today, now that it can afford to be less interested in new possibilities of the means, but concerned with making good artwork. The fine art sensibility of the overall layout of the show itself signifies that digital art has come of age. Ostensibly there is no sign of something that relies on high-definition playback (the latest ‘must-have’), no fast-paced overwhelming flashy graphics, no promises of the shape of things to come, and significantly no internet connection in sight - no webcams, no live screen of other people far away. The antithesis of the all-encompassing fast-paced nature of the web, and the sprawling and ever-evolving and de-evolving web communities, is its analysis. In the growth of the web’s dominance and utilisation by the majority, digital art has found its centre, unable to compete on such a scale, producing more meditative experiments and explorations that take place to provoke individualistic thought, not as a means of expounding the virtues of digital technology, but as a vantage point to analyse what has already happened. Digital art has not, historically, talked the same language as fine art but now the excitement of a new medium is over, it is and will further be absorbed into the canon. In championing the full inclusion of the digital in a fine art context Interval is at the forefront. |
| © 2006 Dave Griffiths. All rights reserved. |