What’s art got to do with it? [Core Post #1, Tania]

Reading the Murray and Manovich pieces, both of which serve as introductions to The New Media Reader, I was struck by the way both authors make use of the affordances of the introduction format. What other type of academic prose would allow for the ultra-compressed intellectual histories narrated by each, or for the grand assertions made in passing? Not coincidentally, the pieces seemed also to share the goal of claiming primary aesthetic status for new media—not just some quantity of aesthetic value, but an overabundance of value to the point of hyperbole. This is where the canny advantages of the introduction format became particularly apparent.

Here’s Manovich: “The greatest hypertext is the Web itself, because it is more complex, unpredictable and dynamic than any novel that could have been written by a single human writer, even James Joyce… The greatest avant-garde film is software such as Final Cut Pro or After Effects…those computer scientists who invented these technologies…are the important artists of our time, maybe the only artists who are truly important and who will be remembered from this historical period” (16).

Murray is less bombastic, but shares Manovich’s project of securing the expressive and aesthetic prowess of new media (thus the reference to Borges as a feeble figure “frozen at the crossroads,” capable only of getting us to the point of a “pullulating, paralyzed consciousness of meaninglessness,” with new media as the savior that will thaw us out of the cultural impasse of old aesthetics.) Which makes me wonder, why? Why this anxiety not merely to establish digitality as a specific, and specifically powerful, set of technologies and practices, with applications across the spectrum of military-industrial and corporate practice, but also to establish it as uniquely aesthetically meaningful? No matter how powerful a cultural force art markets may be, they become marginal when considered alongside the militaristic/industrial/capitalist underpinnings of the actual development and dissemination of these new media (it’s both instructive and ironic here to note that the counterpart Murray chooses for Borges is Vanevar Bush, figured as “moralistic, energetic, and engaged” (4)—Manhattan Project and all.)

 

That digital media have an aesthetic register is not the point; clearly, they do. The sticking point for me is the emphasis, even the anxiety, that runs through these two texts, their sheer insistence on establishing the epochal significance of digital aesthetics. This is partly explanable by the time (relatively early days for new media, and especially for digital art) at which these texts were published; but only partly. Too much to suspect an element of strategy (even if unconscious on the part of these authors) in the invocation of aesthetic (super)value for media imbricated in vast networks of power? Is aesthetic value working here as a form of ideological veiling, a sort of scholarly misdirection? As Gómez-Peña reminds us, as with any medium, the aesthetic affordances of new media are totally soaked in cosiderations of differential access, situated bodies, and the shifting cultural surround.

 

To bolster my speculation, consider that the makers of DALL·E 2 (in an echo of Murray and Manovich) felt the need to justify their product’s existence with the claim that it “will empower people to express themselves creatively.” As if the enhancements to individual expressive capacities were at all of the same scale as the industrial uses to which this AI will, as discussed in class, nearly inevitably be put…