Re: <nettime> Lev on the embarressment of digital art

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From a private chat thread of 30 young artists, writers, researchers..
In response to Lev's post, first added to the chat with the comment: "I think Lev is having an existential crisis 😂"

Person A: I see real people, not "ideas" and meaningless sounds of yet another "electronic music" performance, or yet another meaningless outputs of a neural network invented by brilliant scientists and badly misused by "artists."

B: i wonder why he has the need to generalize so much. no wonder he feels sadness, if he is unable to spot human issues in digital art. the obsoelcense of technologies is in itself an extremely exciting fact that is intertwined with humanitie's drive to self-enhance. and i totally dont think video art from the eighties looks terrible, and has lost its merit and emotional and intellectual appeal. but that works that are medium specific and that have been preserved can even serve as a way to understand better our current relationship to our soon to be obsolete prostheses and technologies. especially the works of women like vali export yvonne rainer Lynn hershman leeson etc. .aybe i dont get his point about obsolencense..? technologies become obsolete in which way? economically, yes! but obsolete in terms of generating insight, meaning, or lending itself to be misused and experimented with, no!

https://youtu.be/BUgSJt7Q7gw
great album created with obsolete systems

C: I agree with some of his sentiment, particularly when going to “digital arts” festivals today. However I don’t get his lamentation about not being accepted into the art world. The potential of media arts was always that it could bypass much of the “art industry” and its traditional apparatus of institutions and financial models. Although it has been a double edged sword, since funding is largely by the tech industry / advertising / corporate culture, so much of its “core values” have become indistinguishable from those industries. That being said, it is probably more of a recent phenomena. When I look at works of Nam June Paik and Lynn Hershman Leeson I still feel extremely inspired. This could easily just be a rant about bad art in general!

I like his bravery to speak from the heart. That is quite refreshing. And quite frankly who isn’t having an existentialist crisis right now. 😂

B: tru 😭🤣

C: Lol yeah, coming from the heart perhaps with a good dose of rumination.

D: I mean algorythms which are less predictable than Lev 'Attention Junkie' Manovich are written every day, but I think if you approach the critique from a perspective of "Most digital-super-newbigthing art is all about form and there's not any real discourse / something at all apart from oh-impressive-oh-suchatimetobealive-oh-beautiful-oh" I'd probably buy it

E: I find this particular passage “It's almost never about our real everyday life and our humanity. Feelings. Passions. Looking at the world. Looking inside yourself. Falling in love. Breaking up. Questioning yourself. Searching for love, meaning, less alienated life.” particularly puzzling that someone who spent so much of his life looking at and thinking about technology and suddenly forgetting, in this moment of art-doubt and self-questioning, that humans and technology have always been intertwined, one being an extension of the other (whether technology of humans, or the other way around). What is human? What is it about technology that is not *of human*?
Reminds me of this idea of us humans so anxious about the edge between human and non-human world being not defined, and using design (and technology) to make this border more palpable… And then something inside (little grown-up Lev) crying out and protesting, and him falling over himself.

But agree with C, most likely it is simply indigestion from too much mediocre art, digital or not, and hence 'ruminating.'

F: I do think there is a lot of media art that is mostly about ‘tinkering’ w new technologies, so the creative element of it is that it’s taking a new technology and using it for a not immediately utilitarian purpose, which makes it fall under the category of art, but which potentially loses its power once those technologies become more integrated into other things.  I think there’s totally a place for this type of exploration but maybe yes some of the ars electronic type work might skip out on some of the feelings of core truth that makes art resonate and hold its meaning for longer

G: I also can’t help thinking about Levs perspective when he gave that lecture on AI aesthetics. How he kept mentioning he comes from science background. While he may have looked at new media art for a long time he might have very narrow scope of what hes looking at in new media art now. Also new media art for new media arts sake feels (like any other media) falls a little flat. You could use his same argument about any other art laking the human as a reason for not making it into museums , collections. I agree that a lot of new media does lack the human element. His issue against ephemerality and being embarrassed is kind of ridiculous.  Also what are his students like if he feels the need to defend art only if it still exists? dismissing something because it’s ephemeral doesn’t lessen its value.



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