Without entering the contentious argument of ‘what is art’, digital art can be narrowly described as unique for the electronic mediums it employs to exercise artistic expression. Like other forms of art it has as much potential to provoke as it has to infringe ethical and moral boundaries. This precarious milieu of provocative artist and exploited subject is demonstrated in a scene of the mini series L word, foregrounding issues already present within our digital era, which include - but are not limited to - surveillance, reputation and privacy.
To contextualise these arguments, a brief background of the unfolding drama within the mini series needs to be understood. Season four and five depicts Bette, a valedictorian, art critic, and current Dean of California University School of the Arts ending her relationship with artist in residence Jodi Lerner. Citing reason for ending their relationship as being unaligned core values, Bette reunites with a former partner while Jodi is left to her own artistic devices to filter and process a break up with a lover who had been emotional astray for some time.
With an impending exhibition, Jodie finds refuge, and more poignantly revenge in objectifying the unaware Bette to demonstrate the theme of her exhibit – titled ‘Core’ representing core values of love, loyalty, honesty and commitment. By engaging various digital techniques the installation is a running film sequence of disjointed periods in time and space where the subject, Bette, is now victim of surreptitiously recorded moments in private settings. This artistic example of remediation via technological devices extracts reality and places it within an altered context: ‘…the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology.’ (Benjamin: 1935 in 1992 p.226).
Compiling distorted sounds with aesthetic permutations, images of a temporally displaced Bette are projected onto geometrically protruding walls while warped sound compounds and heightens the emotive visual effects. Creating greater impact still the visual and audio sequence disregards the one directional screen projection setup and instead beams onto every surface of the space in which the art viewer occupies, evoking a powerful sense of claustrophobia. To view this particular scene go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KobUBE7UFTY&feature=related
Conceptually, an artwork that intends to challenge the conventional power relationship between artist, their work and the art critic is profound. This is precisely the interpretation of the art community, acclaiming it for its demonstration of judging the art critic who is traditionally the judge. However, this installation has deeper, personal intent. In the knowledge of their past relationship we understand the artists’ agenda is not for arts’ sake. Instead this opportunity to repossess power in a vulnerable situation is thus identified as a breach of moral and ethical proportions - identical to the arguments being fought and debated in the all pervasive digitalised culture of today.
Through a public space installation, private boundaries are contravened. The techniques employed to record the subject for this piece mirror the same issues associated with a surveillance society, where privacy and consent cannot be assumed and misrepresentation is beyond our control. Like CCTV the deployment of recording devices in a clandestine manner encroach the privacy of an individual. With the aid of multimedia software the artist has constructed a portrayal of the subject with potentially damaging implications to reputation. While ‘the proliferation of personal data on the Internet can have significant effects on people’s reputations’ (Solove 2007 p. 234) so too can the remediation of identity distributed through mediums where captive audiences await influence.
Whether this scene has been inspired by fact, or simply concocted for dramatic effect, it is an invitation to contemplate the power of surveillance devices when driven by human ill motive. The ability to put to use such devices for the purpose of information gathering, is able to be achieved, irrespective of a subject’s consent. Tagg’s (1988) observation of photography as a technology which ‘…varies with the power relations which invest it’ applies, as is demonstrated by this scene, to all instruments of multi media. As an extension of the technology of photography this example displays the new ability to remediate reality with hardware and software for unethical means. To be clear, this is not accusing technology of being unethical. Rather, it provides an example of the seemingly invisible, yet intrusive nature of nano technology, capable of collecting information on a subject, which, when in the hands of a remediating Svengali, is capable of reconstructing the reputation of that subject which inevitably has the ability to influence audiences in positive and negative ways.
There has always been tension between the ‘creation’ of art and the representation of ‘reality’. The availability and dominance of digital technology, which can both, create the impression of realism or be portrayed as the absolute representation of it (eg. CCTV as legal evidence) has created an interesting problem for me. It seems the less refined and lower resolution a stream of images are the more likely they are to be considered ‘real’. In contrast, the same stream of images, captured hi-res, well lit and coloured will be considered (probably correctly) as staged. But what about the original low-res images? Can’t they be equally as staged?
ReplyDeleteI think our expectations and preconceived notions of what digital video technology can deliver have given us a loaded conception of whether ‘reality’ can be ‘captured’ (suggesting that the images have somehow had their ‘truth’ taken – with or without permission and seemingly without an artificial aspect to the narrative) or whether the images are a ‘representation’ (tapping into our already vast and complicated understanding of the creation of a narrative using a stream of images. Eg. TV, film etc).
I’ll leave you with a quote from Fredric Jameson. He explains the tension between the creation of art and the creation of knowledge.
“Realism” is, however, a peculiarly unstable concept owing to its simultaneous, yet incompatible, aesthetic and epistemological claims, as the two terms of the slogan, “representation of reality,” suggest. These two claims then seem contradictory: the emphasis on this or that type of truth content will clearly be undermined by any intensified awareness of the technical means or representational artifice of the work itself. Meanwhile, the attempt to reinforce…the epistemological vocation of the work generally involves the suppression of the formal properties of the realistic “text” and promotes an increasingly naïve…or reflective conception of aesthetic construction and reception. Thus, where an epistemological claim succeeds, it fails; and if realism validates its claim to being a correct or true representation of the world, it thereby ceases to be an aesthetic mode of representation and falls out of art altogether. If, on the other hand, the artistic devices and technological equipment whereby it captures that truth of the world are explored and stressed and foregrounded, “realism” will stand unmasked as a mere reality – or realism-effect, the reality it purported to deconceal falling at once into the sheerest representation and illusion. Yet no viable conception of realism is possible unless both these demands…are honoured simultaneously, prolonging and preserving – rather than “resolving” – this constitutive tension and incommensurability. (Jameson. ‘Signatures of the Visible’ 1992: 217)