Article Discussion
by Anika Meier
The net art pioneer, who has always treated the web as a medium, says the tech industry is working to make the digital world increasingly invisible, prompting her to demonstrate her belief in the care of digital art
4 comments
Thank you, Auriea. The "what is a game" story landed for me. I think anyone who has spent years explaining what they do to people who arrived with a different definition knows that exhaustion, and I understand why "digital" feels like relief rather than loss. A word that lets you get on with the work is worth something.
What I keep turning over is your point that "digital" is also for the trads outside who do not know what "software running across 25 servers" even means. That feels right, and it made me realise the two words might not be competing at all. "Digital" gets the work through the door. "Net artist" or "web artist" says what the work actually needs once it is inside. You keep the second one for yourself, and I suspect that is what Lialina is doing too when she says she now calls herself a web artist "just to keep the word in circulation."
Maybe the question is less which word wins, and more how the second one travels with the work when the artist is not there to say it.
So I am curious, and this is a real question rather than a challenge: when your own work has been shown or written about by someone else, has the specific word survived the trip? And if it has, what carried it?
@joanakawaharalino I can’t find where to reply to your last comment so I will put it here: Honestly? Mostly no. Or rather, the word that survived was usually someone else's. With Tale of Tales we got so tired of "is it a game" that we made up our own word, Notgames, and put it out there on purpose. Some people picked it up, and the conversation it started was the right one. But in most writing about the work we were still "indie game developers," because that's the box it arrived in. We accepted the box.
What did carry the word, I think, was the collections: Rhizome's Net Art Anthology, the Whitney even SFMOMA. Institutions that took the work as net art have to keep explaining it as net art, the way Olia says her works force museums to install a browser.
The word I'm working on now is "sculptor." My material is the polygon, and when a file travels and gets made physical by someone else's hands somewhere else, I'm not there to say it. So maybe the word has to live inside the file somehow. I'm still figuring that out.
(I also want to say that this is an excellent interview with Olia. She is a constant inspiration. <3)
I would LOVE to hear our community’s thoughts on this, because thirty years in and Lialina says the fight has mostly been over words.
Her reasoning is that the labels are not decoration. "None of these things exist. They're zeros and ones. To give them shape, you have to find words, and these words are very powerful." Computers were named computers rather than calculators so they would seem more human. The desktop metaphor trained people to read a machine as an office. The word arrives first and the understanding follows it.
What I find striking is how her own vocabulary has moved. In 1997 she would have been "furious" to be called a web artist. Now she calls herself one on purpose, "just to keep the word in circulation," because the web is the thing she thinks is disappearing. Post-digital, which she once resisted, is now in her job title, and she needed the "post" as "a critical position, almost as a rejection." The same person, the same practice, and the terms keep changing under her, chosen each time for what they defend rather than what they describe.
Then there is the term she thinks is winning right now: "digital." She sees it "making a comeback as a more general term" that folds seven decades of practice together "without distinguishing between generative, interactive, games, and net art." She is generous about this, calling it a possibly "healthy, calm moment." I am less sure. Every time a field settles on its broadest word, the distinctions that made the work legible get absorbed into a category that describes almost nothing. Summer is a piece of software running across 25 servers in real time. A print of a Frieder Nake plotter drawing is a piece of paper. Both are "digital art" now.
So the question for this forum, and it is one we all have some stake in since we write and post under these labels every day: which word are you actually fighting for? Not the one on your bio, the one you would be annoyed to lose. And what would it cost the work if it were folded into "digital" and left there?
That’s a whole question... I find myself agreeing with Olia in that “digital” is a call for calm... I call myself a “digital artist” so that I don’t have to explain myself all the time. I remember fighting over “what is a game” when I was a videogame designer just because what I was doing within that culture differed in terms of subject and interaction. It was exhausting. “Digital” is not just for those in the know but also for those trads outside who don’t know what “software running across 25 servers” even means. And truth is most of us are doing a lot of different things within that container. Having said that, I too would be sad to not claim being a net artist, a web artist. I would be most sad to let that go.