Computer Art > Multimedia Art > New Media

• art that uses digital technologies as a tool 
• art that uses digital technologies as its own medium 
  Technical History of Digital Art 

• limited to military, academic, and consumer cultureo As We May Think by army scientist Vannevar Bush imagined the 
  first computero Men, Machines and the World Apart by Norbert Wiener 
• 1946 – ENICA the University of Pennsylvania created the first digital computer 
• 1961 – Theodor Nelson coined the terms Hypertext and and Hypermedia to describe texts in which images and sounds could be linked 
• 1964 – RAND Corporation (Cold War think tank) conceptualized the internet as a communication network without central authority that could be safe from a nuclear attack 
• 1968 – Douglas Engelbart from the Stanford Research Institute created came up with the idea of bitmapping, windows, and direct manipulation through a mouse 
  o Bitmapping: each pixel of a computer screen is a assigned on/off (0-1). The computer screen could then be divided into a grid of pixels that create a 2D image 
• 1970’s – Alan Kay of the Xerox Parc in Palo Alto, CA developed the GUI (graphical user interface), and the “desktop” metaphor popularized bu Apple in 1983 
  
  
  Evolution of Digital Art

• developed in connection to Dada and Fluxus: conceptual art has challenged the traditional notions of the art work, audience, and artist 
• 1984 – William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” in his novel Neruomancer 
• 1990’s – Digital art began making it’s way into museums and galleries 
• digital arts festivals 
  o ICC (Tokyo, Japan)o ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany)o Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria)o Transmediale (Berlin, Germany) o SIGGRAPH (Los Angeles, USA) 

Boris Groys

 Truth of Art

_{Dziga Vertov kneels to shoot a train in Man with a Movie Camera (1929).}

_{A movie theater audience participates by calling out in response to onscreen actors’ lines at a screening of Rocky Horror Picture Show.}

Traditionally, the artist produced an artwork in his or her studio, hidden from public view, and then exhibited a result, a product—an artwork that accumulated and recuperated the time of absence. This time of temporary absence is constitutive for what we call the creative process—in fact, it is precisely what we call the creative process.

André Breton tells a story about a French poet who, when he went to sleep, put on his door a sign that read: “Please, be quiet—the poet is working.” This anecdote summarizes the traditional understanding of creative work: creative work is creative because it takes place beyond public control—and even beyond the conscious control of the author. This time of absence could last days, months, years—even a whole lifetime. Only at the end of this period of absence was the author expected to present a work (maybe found in his papers posthumously) that would then be accepted as creative precisely because it seemed to emerge out of nothingness.¹

_{Frances Bacon’s studio, photographed by Perry Ogden.}

Today, subjectivity has become a technical construction: the contemporary subject is defined as an owner of a set of passwords that he or she knows—and that other people do not know. The contemporary subject is primarily a keeper of a secret. In a certain sense, this is a very traditional definition of the subject: the subject was long defined as knowing something about itself that only God knew, something that other people could not know because they were ontologically prevented from “reading one’s thoughts.” Today, however, being a subject has less to do with ontological protection, and more to do with technically protected secrets. The internet is the place where the subject is originally constituted as a transparent, observable subject—and only afterwards begins to be technically protected in order to conceal the originally revealed secret. However, every technical protection can be broken. Today, the hermeneutiker has become a hacker. The contemporary internet is a place of cyber wars in which the prize is the secret. And to know the secret is to control the subject constituted by this secret—and the cyber wars are the wars of this subjectivation and desubjectivation. But these wars can take place only because the internet is originally the place of transparency …

The results of surveillance are sold by the corporations that control the internet because they own the means of production, the material-technical basis of the internet. One should not forget that the internet is owned privately. And its profit comes mostly from targeted advertisements. This leads to an interesting phenomenon: the monetization of hermeneutics. Classical hermeneutics, which searched for the author behind the work, was criticized by the theoreticians of structuralism, close reading, and so forth, who thought that it made no sense to chase ontological secrets that are inaccessible by definition. Today this old, traditional hermeneutics is reborn as a means of economically exploiting subjects operating on the internet, where all the secrets are supposedly revealed. The subject is here no longer concealed behind his or her work. The surplus value that such a subject produces and that is appropriated by internet corporations is the hermeneutic value: the subject not only does something on the internet, but also reveals him- or herself as a human being with certain interests, desires, and needs. The monetization of classical hermeneutics is one of the most interesting processes that has emerged in recent decades. The artist is interesting not as producer but as consumer. Artistic production by a content provider is only a means of anticipating this content provider’s future consumption behavior—and it is this anticipation alone that is relevant here because it brings profit.²

_{Mark Zuckerberg unveils a Facebook team dedicated to creating social experiences in virtual reality.}

© 2016 e-flux and the author