First #3: Goodbye, World! Looking at Art in the Digital Age
Digital culture, art, and the role of technology
How technology mediates our experience of art, and how institutions and artists are rethinking how art is presented in the digital age
My first visit to Paris was in the summer of 2002. I sweltered in the heat. The message from my guidebook was unanimous. If you are going to Paris for the first time, then you absolutely — you must — see the Mona Lisa!
Art Seen
A poorly lit photo taken with my Canon Digital IXUS embodied the irony of how technology had mediated my consumption of this art. My visit to the Louvre was driven by the need to capture this photo.
A victim of its fame, the Mona Lisa is behind bulletproof tinted glass. Its stratospheric value has made it the target of vandalism and theft on multiple occasions. A protective screen is needed to preserve it from attack, and the effect of thousands of flashes directed at it every single day. The irony doesn’t escape me that these protective measures prevent anyone from seeing the painting in its original form.1
The Mona Lisa has also acted as a catalyst for recalculating how we attribute value to art — either in original or counterfeit form, or as a commodity product.
Your Data, My Data
In Goodbye, World! Looking at Art in the Digital Age, Omar Kholief considers how our consumption of art is not only mediated, but also transformed by digital culture.
Museums and galleries, which house many of the world's finest artworks, are under increasing pressure to respond to changing expectations of how art should be presented — deconstructing the white cube — while also rethinking the meaning of digital art. This is especially important as art has historically been defined on an exclusionary basis, delineating African and Indigenous pieces as craft while centering Anglo-Euro cultural works as art.
The increased reliance on technology to control how art is digitally presented and accessed means that institutions are increasingly becoming interested in collecting data as a secondary objective — not only from interactions taking place within galleries but also from obtaining and using data gathered from visitors. Such data collection can happen directly or from intermediary inputs such as Wifi or visitor apps. These data represent our digital cultural beings and when aggregated, they become an appealing commodity for any institution to mine.
Fine art is a lucrative industry. The British market alone generates over £9 billion in sales during 2022. The value of the data we generate from our phones when we browse, upload to social media or congregate in public spaces is less clear to quantify. However, institutions are becoming much wiser in recognising the value of collecting these data.
“Have you ever logged on to a museum Wi-Fi connection? Have you ever read the terms and conditions before you pressed accept? The odds are unlikely you have had the time to notice that sometimes you agree to being monitored. Time is your greatest commodity; information is your greatest asset.” — Goodbye, World! Looking at Art in the Digital Age, pg. 108
Autonomy Cube by Trevor Paglen is a conceptual art piece that critiques the data gold rush being sought by so many cultural institutions. In this work, a highly visible wireless network runs through Tor, a protocol that facilitates anonymised internet access. The cube physically contradicts the invisibility of free Wifi offered in many public spaces — all they need is your email address, and perhaps, a quick survey response. Autonomy Cube prompts us to reconsider the ease with which we hurry to accept terms in exchange for our browsing data to be tracked, stored, and potentially monetised.
Technologically wrapped
Interactive digital technology surrounds us. It is in our pockets and on our wrists. In turn, these technologies have irreversibly changed many aspects of what we perceive to be art — its definition, access, distribution and reproduction.
“The continual evolution of the internet, the ubiquity of mobile devices, and an array of software applications have led to a kind of image circulation that is unparalleled to what has come before. But we no longer just examine an image, we metabolize it: taking it in, processing it, and then repurposing it for new public consumption... The form in which [an image] gets shared is but one variation among hundreds, with many leading back to an "original" work (e.g., the Mona Lisa) or to a new kind of work that eludes the notion of originality altogether.” — Goodbye, World! Looking at Art in the Digital Age, pg. 173
The discourse around the role of AI in art is going in many directions, and there are many justified concerns around the algorithmic theft of art to diffuse and generate derivative works — but ultimately, AI is only turbocharging practices that many artists have employed in the past to create new works. Where does originality begin?
Conclusion
My review only covers only a tiny fraction of the subjects explored by Goodbye, World! — ranging from the meaning of copyright in the age of digital art, post-internet art, hosting and presentation of digital art, along with extensive discussions on ways that artists are using technology to create new AI-assisted art.
Interactive digital systems form a new kind of technological gaze. After reading Goodbye, World! you will be nudged into defining your position on where and why technology should mediate your relationship with art today.
Goodbye, World! Looking at Art in the Digital Age by Omar Kholief. Published in 2018 by Sternberg Press, 211 pages.
More from Omar Kholief
Internet_Art: From the Birth of the Web to the Rise of NFTs (Phaidon Press, 2023, 296 pages)
Downloading Arab Identity (from afikra عفكرة podcast, 2023)
Explore further
On Substack
I highly recommend the engaging research published by Eryk Salvaggio. The 27 June 2021 edition of his newsletter Cybernetic Forests has a detailed discussion of how our use of language affects perception, and how this can be used in the work of research.
Amanda Wong discusses how we make sense of the diffusion, abstraction and reduction in AI-generated art in the 4 June 2023 edition of the Reboot newsletter.
Listen
I have selected these podcast episodes to extend our reflections on the way we view art. I want to shift the locus of attention to rest upon the Black Gaze. I want to be agitated by (dis)comfort. I want to be immersed in the quiet contemplative environment that art affords.
Transcripts are available for Discomfort as (curatorial) strategy — with Amal Alhaag and Rita Ouédraogo and He spent 10 years in a museum. This is what he learned
Watch
The Price of Everything (2018) examines the absurdities of the contemporary art market. As in tech, contemporary art is an investment vehicle, turning paintings into assets. We witness the dismay of artists such as Njideka Akunyili Crosby as they realise the multiplying value of their art once it is out of their hands and “on the market”. In support of this review, this film raises interesting questions about the financialisation of art, and how or where it is made available for the public to view — especially as most art purchases are now speculative investments. (dir. Nathaniel Kahn, 2018, 98 mins, available to rent on Amazon Prime UK)
Magazine
Errant Journal #3: Discomfort (Digital edition, 2022, €5), in particular “Discomfort Against Empathy” by Rebecca Glyn-Blanco, pg. 45-54
Read
A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See by Tina M. Campt (MIT Press, 2023, 219 pages)
Why museums are bad vibes by Gabrielle de la Puente (from The White Pube, 2019)
The Whole Picture: The colonial story of the art in our museums & why we need to talk about it by Alice Procter (Cassell, 2020, 320 pages)
London’s faffiest museum by diamond geezer (from diamond geezer, 2023)
When it’s time to dial down the volume by Enuma Okoro (from FT Weekend, Life & Arts section, 2023)
You couldn’t make it up. Just as I was doing a final read-through and finishing my last edits, two environmental protestors decided to throw soup at the Mona Lisa last Sunday!
A treat post to read with my morning coffee. One of my discomforts with Instagram, was how we view and share artists works on the app, almost as an unconscious reflex.
So many remain unseen - metaphorically and literally.
Diving into Diamond Geezers and your pod recs. thanks for including Shade!