Skye Burgan

Darren Tofts article “Your Place or Mine? Locating Digital Art” compares digital media to French theorist, Guy Debord, who said in 1967 “all that once was directly lived has become mere representation”. By this he means, within “advanced Capital economies lived experience has become a spectacle”. Everything we experience is through visual means and we never experience anything first hand. Tofts discusses virtual reality, saying that it is not anything like watching a film but rather an experience described as “totally immersed within visual environment that is not real but appears as if it is”. He discusses how this life is no longer through the body, but through the web and that in turn we go to the “world beyond”. This world of virtual reality gives us Digital Art. However, the problem he states is that we need computers for it to exist. More specifically, he says Digital Art is “computer based” and “computer bound”. His major point is that to experience virtual reality we are bound because we need a computer, lap top or anything with a screen. We must interact with the computer.

Toft draws on Brenda Laurel’s view that interface design is similar to theatre, that we have a “willing suspension of disbelief” because “identification can only go so far”. She makes it clear that the element of “spectator” and “spectacle” are there in digital art, just like any other form of art.

This article is stating that even though it is called “Digital Art” it doesn’t mean it should be solely seen in a museum. Digital Art is much better suited for the street as “cyber culture has a disavowel of privacy”. As well, Digital Art is interactive as opposed to contemplative, so it wouldn’t fit into a gallery. This form of art as well would not do well in public as people would distract you waiting in line for their turn.  What is great about Digital Art, Trofts says, is that not everyone can own expensive art, however, everyone interested in digital media can potentially look online in their own spaces. The problem is that sometimes Digital Art can only be advertised through museums, which puts artists in an awkward place, because initially Digital Art is meant to happen anywhere.

What makes digital art so amazing is the different works that can be produced. For example, Chris Hales has devised something where a person can be viewed in the Digital media itself. You experience the art by watching yourself, by standing in front of a blue screen, where your silhouette is captured and fed through virtual space and then shown to you, on a screen.

The article makes clear that the total immersion of sensorium is a long way off. However, programs have been developed where you can walk around it and explore hidden screens because you become a part of the interface. Tofts also states how important perambulation as an aesthetic is to Digital Art. Digital Art is supposed to allow “Feeling as if you are actually chasing the white rabbit into wonderland, without worrying about tripping over wires”. Digital Art is all about creating a “magic place of literary memory”. Digital Art is only becoming more innovative as we go along, Digital Art allows us to leave one world and enter another.

Tofts real argument at the end of his article is that it still remains a mystery to whether digital media will find a home in mainstream art galleries. It would go against the real nature of digital media, which is it “should be all around us, every where we look”.

Will Digital Art become freely accessible outside institutions, challenging the context for viewing art? Or will it thrive within museums and art institutions?

Gerald Fantone

In Darren Tofts’ article, “Your Place or Mine: Locating Digital Art”, he discusses the problematic issue of properly housing digital art, whether it will be in the mainstream art galleries or other places.

First he talks about visual culture using the statements of the French social theorist Guy Debord. Debord thinks that “media saturated cultures reduced social relations to an incessant flow of images.” The real experiences that evolve each day are translated to just a spectacle which draws a separation between the audience and the visual language. He provides the example of seeing a movie wherein the audiences “are totally immersed within a visual environment that is not real, but appears as if it is.” (29) Debord suggests the ‘world beyond’ (29), which is an abstract and artificial representation of reality generated by computers.

Tofts then presents digital art as being permanently bound to the medium of computers. It is “unthinkable without the material apparatus of the computer, a CPU and monitor, and its physical proximity to the user.” (30) Brenda Laurei uses the metaphor of seeing a play performed on a proscenium stage to describe the involvement of the audience to computer-based digital arts. Like a play, there is always that boundary that separates the spectacle and spectator as two distinct forms.

As digital art is in the process of defining its literal and cultural sense, it also trying to determine where it should take place. The traditional gallery seems to be a fit. Galleries often generate a more in-depth meaning from totally disrupting the objects’ ordinary use like the television and video installations by Nam June Paik.  However, on the one hand, galleries do not address the true nature of digital art which is to interact rather than to contemplate. Its purpose is to provide an interactive space where the spectators can simultaneously become the spectacle. Tofts suggests that “inhabitants of simulated, virtual worlds don’t want to find the seams that betray the virtuality of the world they are in.” (32) He also offers the act of walking as a central part to the virtual experience wherein spectators goes through a “magic place(s) of literary memory” as Ted Nelson calls it.

The search for the place that will house digital media continues, but Debord’s spectacle suggests that “it is clear that such art should be all around us, everywhere we look, which is, of course, the goal of immersive experience.” (35) Can it be this way? Digital art should be made highly accessible to the public and think how great our surrounding will look if interactive art works are all around us.

Digital art, also known as digital media, is centered around the Internet and the World Wide Web. It can contain things such as text, images, sound, and film. One of the key components of digital art is its interactive element; it allows the audience to experience the art’s content in whichever order they please.

While some people are very open and receptive to digital media, embracing it as a new art form, others are more critical of it. In fact, some people go so far as to deny its value as an art form. In Your Place or Mine? Locating Digital Art, Darren Tofts analyzes digital art and points out its shortcomings. He points out that not only is it computer-based, but computer bound — it cannot be experienced without a computer and the Internet. Tofts also states that digital art is simply perceived (and sometimes heard, if there are sound clips). It does not include the majority of the spectator’s senses. Because of this, the spectacle and the spectator are very distinct from each other. Tofts says that, while there is the element of interaction, it is limited. We as spectators can only suspend our disbelief for so long before we remember that our involvement is still just an analogue procedure.

One of the main points that Darren Tofts brings up is that digital art is still in the process of finding its place in the literal as well as cultural sense. He discusses this in relation to the location of digital art: where should it be displayed? Tofts says that the street is a more appropriate place to exhibit digital art than a gallery or a museum, because there is a lack of privacy with a street exhibition, just as there is on the Internet. The technology required for digital media doesn’t need the context of a gallery for it to work. Also, digital art is interactive; it isn’t contemplative like most works of art that are shown in galleries. Interactive exhibits don’t work as well in a gallery — the distraction of the crowd waiting for their turn would not allow a spectator to fully experience the work of art.

However, digital art currently depends on museums and gallery exhibits, with computer stations, to attract viewers and obtain a following. Tofts says that in order to effectively move digital art away from the computer and introduce it into real spaces, it requires something that permits movement through a compelling, realistic environment. Visitors to this exhibit would have to be unable to find seams that betray the virtual element of the world they’ve found themselves in.

Until digital art becomes a staple in today’s culture, it will have to struggle with the problem of its location.

Given the fact that Darren Tofts has outlined several problems with digital media, do you feel that it should be considered “art”? If so, where do you believe that it should be exhibited, and what would be the benefits of this?

Melissa Kerman

In his article “Your Place or Mine? Locating Digital Art”, Tofts discusses how media has become such a great part of our culture and it permeates through our lives and social relations. Our society today lives largely in a visual world of spectacles. This thus causes virtual culture to emerge as a new social formation. In our virtual culture, digital art has become more and more popular.

Digital Art

• Digital art is based on the computer and also bound to it. It is accessed through the internet.
• Being on a computer screen and due to peripheral vision, this new form of art only takes up part of the overall sensory environment around the spectator. There will always be reminders of the world outside of the experience.
• The experience relies on interaction. It is more of an individual experience.
• The spectator and spectacle are separate from each other. Often the spectator not only becomes the spectacle but will watch his or herself as the spectacle.
• Many, especially those in cyber circles, wonder whether digital art or other virtual arts will find a place in mainstream art collections and galleries.

Problem of Location

• Since digital art is more interactive than contemplative, it is difficult to have it in a gallery. The crowd in a line behind the spectator waiting for their turn would be a large distraction from the experience.
• A large issue and question brought up by Tofts is the suitable site to place digital art.
• The intermediate equipment needed for the display does not actually need a gallery and one could have the privacy of his or her own place.
• One of the major reasons for locating digital art within a gallery is to find and create an audience.
• Some works will be so detailed with a lot of information one would have to return to the gallery several times to fully experience it.
• Since digital art is reliant on high technology, its problem with location causes it to struggle as an art form.

Interactive Installation Art

• Interactive installation art “offers some interesting versions of a different kind of experience of identification from computer-bound work.” (Tofts, 32)
• More architectural and surrounds the participant completely causing them to be more aware of interacting with a space. Thus, it is closer to a total interaction of the senses than works bound to the computer with the screen so close by.

Questions

• How can the problem of location be solved? Where would be the best place to put digital art? Where do you see digital media in the near future? Will it progress or vanish?

Karina Pogosyan

• “All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.” (pg. 29) So begins the article titled Your Place or Mine? Locating Digital Art. This quote comes from observations made by a French social theorist, Guy Debord, over three decades ago with regard to new social trends in representing reality. “…he was thinking about the ways in which media saturated cultures reduced social relations to an incessant flow of images…In other words, within advanced capitalist economies lived experience had become a spectacle.” (pg. 29) Today, this statement can be easily associated with the virtual world of computers which to an extent separates many of its users from the real world of experiences. This article by Darren Tofts sets out to look into aesthetics of virtual artifice and its locality in today’s art world.

• Digital art is inconceivable without a computer. Everyone knows that. However, even though no body can argue the interactive nature of digital art, it is still limited by the degree to which we can forget that our involvement with it still remains an analogue procedure. We are able to suspend our disbelief for a while, like in theatre, but the factors still exist in the process that prevent us from complete immersion into this ‘other’ reality computers can create for us. So how do we help this experience in becoming closer to reality?

• The museum does not appear suited for accomplishing this task. The main problem here is obvious: digital art is interactive and less contemplative form of art then the artifacts one usually sees in galleries. Museum aids in reaching and perhaps creating a wider audience for digital media but that’s about it. The undeniable benefit of digital art consists in one’s ability to purchase a program or a CD and easily obtain that “digital media artifact” they have seen presented in a gallery space and then use it in the privacy of their own home. Darren Tofts uses historic examples of works by Merce Cunningham and John Cage, Nam June Paik and Carl Andre. Their electronic art works and multi-media performances rejected the traditional gallery setting for display and succeeded in making a contribution to electronic, multimedia art. The work of Cunningham and Cage, for example, introduced the practice of triggering lights and sound by the movements of a dancer through a spatial environment crisscrossed by sensors. The legacy of their work can today be seen in the projects by a British multimedia artist, Chris Hales that exhibit “unencumbered virtual reality”. “In this way, Debord’s early vision of a spectacle becomes not only something that you are in, but that you also can watch yourself in.”  (pg. 31-32)

• Although the complete immersion of the sensorium is still a long way off,  the creative innovations and highly interactive mediums achieved by the installations such as Rehearsal of Memory in Sydney (1996) and Handsight (1992-93), take inclusiveness one step further. With such works one becomes highly conscious of interacting with space; the experience in this case becomes more inclusive, adding a sense of depth to the experience that is hard to achieve when the screen is only inches away. So this is what would be rendered ‘an important aesthetic criterion’: feeling as if you are chasing the White Rabbit into Wonderland, without worrying about tripping over the wires… Or in other words, a work that would empower one to have a stronger sense of a virtual experience into which one enters. The author mentions Cyberzone installation (1995) by Jon McCormack as being the most successful so far at achieving this: “…one was highly conscious of leaving one world behind and delving into another.” (pg. 34)

• The author then states with some regret that although such works are successful, the problem of their locality will always remain as long they will still require ‘a meta-place, a location for their evocation to “take place”…At the moment, like most computer-bound digital art, it is very much a touring exhibit that finds temporary residence in university galleries, occasional exhibitions aimed at introducing cyberculture to the general public (such as Cyberzone).” (pg. 34)

• The article ends almost the same as it began: with the reference to Guy Debord’s spectacle analogy. “…it is clear that such art should be all around us, everywhere we look, which is, of course, the goal of immersive experience. As an art form dependent upon high technology, though, digital art will have to struggle, as previous avant-garde art has done, with the problematic issue of its location.” (pg. 35)

Question: Although at this point total virtual immersion is still impossible, all energy is devoted by its proponents to attaining this state of art. Is this good or bad? What could be the pros and cons of creating such an environment where we would be surrounded by digital art everywhere? Or are we maybe better off the way we are today? In my opinion (I am not a computer fanatic) – we should use our imagination as a tool of enabling ourselves to immerse from one world and into the other. Our imagination is always with us (its locality issue is therefore solved) and it can create anything we want it to (aesthetically always satisfying). On the other hand, it is amazing what we can do with our technology today. Ultimately though, we come to the conclusion that reality is always best.