The highly compressed, deteriorated ‘poor image mocks the promises of digital technology. Not only is it often degraded to the point of being just a hurried blur, one even doubts whether it could be called an image at all.’ The aesthetic affect of digital images thus stands in metonymically for the networks they navigate and the means by which those networks are exposed.

“But even if the internet is dead this doesnt mean it’s over. It is all over.”

I found Claire Bishop’s landmark essay on Digital Art, ‘The Digital Divide’ in Artforum’s 50th Anniversary issue three months late through Lauren Cornell and Brian Droitcour’s equally polemic response, ‘Technical Difficulties’ in the January 2013 issue. Since September, there have been excellent conversations, both inside and outside the New Media community. There are a plethora of positions on Bishop’s highly successful essay; success in that it has created such a stir. The problem with the conversation, and I dare not say dialogue, is that the rhetoric resulting from ‘The Digital Divide’ is disjoint along several lines, in some ways schematizing some of the reasons for her polemic. Secondly, the resulting cross-takedown between Lauren Cornell/Brian Droitcour and Bishop remind me that I no longer live in the relatively generous era in which we built the genre of New Media in the 90’s.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO DIGITAL ART? Cast your mind back to the late 1990s, when we got our first e-mail accounts. Wasn’t there a pervasive sense that visual art was going to get digital, too, harnessing the new technologies that were just beginning to transform our lives? But somehow the venture never

This is my response to Claire Bishop‘s essay “Digital Divide“, published in Artforum in September 2012 (also posted in the comments section of the article): Reading this article was a pleasure, and a pain. Some of the points made here are really good, and I also felt a lot of empathy for many of the

So ArtForum have launched a special September issue investigating the, lets say broader, relationship between new media, technology and visual art.* Of worthy mention is the essay Digital Divide by the art world's antagonistic critic of choice Claire Bishop, a writer whom a little under 8 years ago,

Art historian and associate professor at New York’s CUNY Graduate Center Claire Bishop has taken to the pages of Artforum’s September edition to issue a kind of rebuke for contemporary art. She argues, in an extended essay that only briefly detours into egregious artspeak, that though the new realities of technology and the internet provide the fundamental context for art currently being made, art and artists have failed to critically confront this context and are too content simply to respond and adapt to it. Bishop writes simplistically of digital art that “somehow the venture never really gained traction,” and that “the appearance and content of contemporary art have been curiously unresponsive to the total upheaval in our labor and leisure inaugurated by the digital revolution.” Is it really the case that art has been so nonreactive to such a huge change in our world?

Bishop rightly notes that, “Most art today deploys new technology at one if not most stages of its production, dissemination, and consumption.” Like any time in history, artists have taken to contemporary technology, adapting computers, portable projectors, and server networks as art-making materials (see Stan VanDerBeek’s 1963-66 “Movie-Drome” at the New Museum’s Ghosts in the Machine exhibition for one such example). Yet the author goes on to cite contemporary artists who aren’t exactly the names one immediately comes up with when considering the avant-garde of digital art. She considers Frances Stark, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Ryan Trecartin as artists who do make some effort to be technologically engaged, but Bishop fails to acknowledge other artists who truly confront digital technology, both appropriating it and reflecting on it critically.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO DIGITAL ART? Cast your mind back to the late 1990s, when we got our first e-mail accounts. Wasn’t there a pervasive sense that visual art was going to get digital, too, harnessing the new technologies that were just beginning to transform our lives? But somehow the venture never

This month, Art Forum published a very timely, and beautifully written essay by Claire Bishop entitled, Digital Divide: on contemporary Art and New Media“. In it, Bishop analyses the contemporary art-world’s reluctance to conceptually engage with the changes which have been wrought by the proliferati