Digital Art Criticism

Jenny Weight
RMIT University, Melbourne
E-mail: geniwate@ozemail.com.au
Key features: References; Notes; Author Details

All the nodes in this issue:

Editorial
Bibliography of Hypertext Criticism

Mez Breeze

Julianne Chatelain Richard E. Higgason Deena Larsen Bill Marsh Adrian Miles Jenny Weight

An exploration of the metaphysics [1] of digital information is relevant to digital art criticism. Digital information possesses characteristic properties. Many have been previously outlined: malleability, accessibility, and infinite versioning. The popular dualistic thought involving an ontological divide between humans and the digital may be added to these characteristics. What does this mix imply about digital art? How does digital art impact on consciousness? These are not questions relating digital to non-digital art. Nor can we hold much hope of attaining knowledge of the digital in itself. They are questions about digital art and human consciousness. They are phenomenological questions [2].

Various schools of digital art criticism have emerged, but they have not greatly explored the phenomenology and ontology of digital art. It is a tribute to Landow (1997) that a lot of what he says in Hypertext 2.0 now seems self-evident: his theories have been incorporated into everyday thoughts about digital writing and distributed networks. However, by focusing on the exciting possibilities afforded by hypertextual connections and contrasting them to pre-digital forms of writing, Landow tends towards a portrayal of digital information as magic [3].

Criticism that attempts to situate digital art in terms of a non-digital tradition (the pre-eminent text is Manovich 2001) obscures attempts to understand digital information and its relation to human consciousness per se and also implicitly compounds the magical effect [4].

A phenomenological theory of digital information demands attention to experience rather than theory (Wild 1969: 16; Matthews 1996: 88 [5]).

Notes

[1] By metaphysics I mean that instances of digital information appear to be objects of some sort, external to ourselves. Since they are external to us, our interactions with them must be metaphysical in some sense: we do not experience them in any kind of direct, a priori or unmediated way. Merleau-Ponty (1964: 93) uses philosophy and metaphysics interchangeably.

[2] "Phenomenology is best understood as a radical, anti-traditional style of philosophising, which emphasises the attempt to get to the truth of matters, to describe phenomena, in the broadest sense as whatever appears in the manner in which it appears, that is as it manifests itself to consciousness, to the experiencer." (Moran 2000: 4)

[3] For example, Landow (1997: 82) reports: "The speed with which one can move between passages and points in sets of tests changes both the way we read and the way we write, just as the high-speed number-crunching computing changed various scientific fields by making possible investigations that before had required too much time or risk."

Stivers (2001: 7), however, suggests that because "computers can process enormous amounts of information rapidly and we worship quantity, speed and growth, the computer appears omnipotent - we attribute to it omnipotent powers and expect a utopian future from its use".

Whereas Landow (chapters 1 and 6) justifies the apparent inability of hypertextual networks to present narrative by eulogising 'writerly' relations with the text, Stivers wonders about the things computers can't do, like handle "qualitative concepts and ideas that have been expressed symbolically and embedded in tradition and narrative" (p. 7), and why the shortcomings of computers are so often downplayed.

[4] My review of Manovich (2001) appeared in Electronic Book Review, August 2002.

[5] As Merleau-Ponty (1964: 97) says "it is in the actual practice of speaking that I learn to understand". Perhaps this principle should be applied to the practice of writing code via which we can come to understand digital information and digital art.

References

Landow, G. P. (1997) Hypertext 2.0: the Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press)

Manovich, L. (2001) The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)

Matthews, E. (1996) Twentieth-century French Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964) Signs (Northwestern University Press)

Moran, D. (2000) Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge)

Stivers, R. (2001) Technology as magic - the triumph of the irrational (New York: Continuum)

Wild, John (1969) "Introduction". In Lévinas, E. Totality and Infinity: an Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press)