Digital Art [2017-2019]

About

Digital Art

What does it mean to speak of an art that is digital? The productive discussions during Digital Art’s introductory year (2017-18) have shown that we need to put pressure on the existing definition of ‘digital art’ as ‘digital-born, computable art that is created, stored, and distributed via digital technologies’ (Paul, Digital Art, 2016, p. 2). This year, Digital Art proposes to expand its theoretical project towards examining what the term ‘digital’ might mean for art as such. Definitions of the digital vary widely across fields and disciplines, necessitating a broadening of our previous focus on art practice to take in discussions from media theory and the history of technology, as well as accounts of digital culture more generally conceived. Our central research questions for the year will therefore be: If the digital is a complex interdisciplinary concept, what is at stake in calling art ‘digital’? And how does a close analysis of the digital as a technological and cultural construction enable new discourses concerning art practices in a digital age?

Our new programme of events frames this discussion around the three senses of digital that are crucial to art practice today, namely the digital as a technology, as a medium, and as an aesthetic. Along the lines of this tripartite division further significant questions will structure each term’s discussions: (1) What relation does digital technology have to the final work as we experience it through interfaces? (2) Under what conditions can we think of the digital as a medium? (3) Is there an aesthetic form specific to the digital, and if so, what is its impact on art and visual culture?
 

Themes

Michaelmas Term 2018: The Digital as Technology

The German media theorist Friedrich Kittler famously claimed that the condition of the digital was one of substituting surfaces for the material technologies beneath. ‘Inside the computer’, he wrote, ‘everything becomes a number’, and so every image produced through computation is reducible to code alone. This term, we investigate the gulf between representation and the technologies that make it possible, asking to what extent the subterranean world of numbers might determines the digital art that it produces.

Administrative assistance: Networks@crassh.cam.ac.uk