Art of the Digital Age Chapter 7

Machines can make art, like robots printing out digital manifestations or driving interactive sculpture, but sometimes the machines themselves are the art. Sometimes the artistic expression is the instrument that could be used to create or experience. This is the case with net art, or art that is created for the interwebs. But before you even create a website you can create a database or a piece of software, better yet you can create a full fledged video game. I have often thought about the possibilities in video games, a medium that takes all of the story telling of a film and transposes it into an interactive experience. You have the freedom to give your audience freedom in their experience of a video game while also constricting the parameters of that freedom to show them only what is in the frame.

This makes sense as the pre-amble to the chapter on net art, but in some ways in the modern context it needs to be seen after you consider net art. The internet is everywhere, all things are contained in it and it is contained in all of the things that we know and use today. When you take something out of that interconnected context, you can actually see something new manifest itself. Take the idea of a Database art project for example: any data set that naturally collects and evolves can be correlated with the art of your choosing.

Waves Documentation from Matt Roberts on Vimeo.


Above you can see an art installation that uses the information from a database to drive the performance of the artifact. There are many projects just like this one, but as you will quickly see the lines between net art and database or software are fuzzy at best. Much of the artwork and technology that uses computers today relies heavily on the infrastructure of the internet.

For this reason, it is a sort of fools errand to try to differentiate between the forms of art that utilize the different aspects of technology. Instead, I think that Bruce Wands and other art theorists should focus on finding the stylistic heritage and the tropes that are used in the digital medium. Like the surrealists, the afro-latin-political muralists, or perhaps the impressionist movement, in each of those genres you can see many mediums formats and techniques applied, but there is a tenuous string holding them together and defining their expression.