At Transmediale 2018, LIMA held a workshop which attempted to map what a creation of a digital art canon in the Netherlands would entail. The room, full of various professionals, media art historians, and artistic producers, included a multiplicity of perspectives on the feasibility of the endeavour. It was acknowledged that there remains a friction between contemporary art and digital art, and concerns arose about digital art history being seen as a ‘parallel’ art history to traditional art history. It was also noted that media art and digital artworks have a natural resistance to being canonised—the community itself having emerged out of a desire to avoid institutionalisation. Furthermore, the question of the identity of this field emerged: what is digital art? What terms can be used to describe these types of works? The question of historical distance also arose, and LIMA offered a potential timeline through which to begin a canonisation enterprise—from the 50’s to around 2010. The problems that arise with the ontology of digital works led to preservation and collection concerns. The criteria through which one might begin to select artworks for canonisation—or indeed, the very fact of having such explicit criteria—was also challenged. It was noted, for example, that historicisation is always-already curational and selective. In order to achieve a canonisation of digital art, there are several steps which could be deemed essential; 1) a definition of the field and its socio-historical shifts, 2) the mapping out of an aesthetic discourse particular to this field 3) the redefinition of traditional artistic concepts and terms, 4) an outlining of its socio-historical context (computer revolution, but also changes in behavior and relationships between artists and audience), 5) charting out a new conception of ‘exhibition space’ for the variety of digital artworks, 6) mapping the ‘art world’ of ‘digital art’. During the talk, Inke Arns proposes the title of ‘The Unknown Pioneers of Contemporary Art’, which not only side-steps the problem of art historical terms concerning this art field, but also focuses on the important point that LIMA wants to bring across—that digital art and digital culture is an important and often overlooked part of the history of contemporary art. Indeed, it was discussed that the ‘digital turn’ is more of an epistemological phenomenon—more about perception and methodologies and approaches rather than its technological methods.
The community discussion led to important pointers on how LIMA should think about developing a digital art canon. Education, publication and exhibition—creating a digital art sphere—was emphasised, in order to enhance the visibility and understanding of digital artworks. Other steps were also deemed necessary in order to successfully create a ‘canon’. Firstly, there is a need to rethink the contemporary art canon, and current art history itself, due to the conceptual and practical challenges that digital art brings to these debates. There therefore needs to be a reevaluation of the art historical paradigm, and of the terms and concepts that can no longer apply to digital art (the bounded art object, authorship, original, etc.). This then leads to a need to contextualise the work within digital culture and even science history, and mapping out the diverse aesthetic discourses that influence and are a part of the digital art sphere. Secondly, there is also a debate on the role of the museums and the art historians, which have often acted as gatekeepers in the community. New alliances and coalitions must be formed, and there is the opportunity to create exhibitions in galleries, Biennales, and so on, which experiment with traditional exhibition formats to highlight digital art in new ways. Indeed, the necessity of the canonisation of ‘digital art’ lies in the conceptual, theoretical, and logistical misunderstandings that often occur in the reception, collection, and exhibition of such artworks. As has been noted by other scholars, digital artworks often induce attitudes of technophilia and ‘computational essentialism’ or ‘software determinism’, which influence the reception and historicity of artworks when contextualised within traditional art contexts (Graham and Cook, 2010; Rugg and Sedgwick, 2012). Josephine Bosma—self-described ‘witness’ and ‘adamant researcher’ of online communities concerning digital art—noted how this multiplicity of misunderstandings concerning net art, amongst other digital art, has stunted the growth of this artistic field (2011). The role of publication therefore also important in this canonisation project, in order to create a framework that young art historians can use, and which can allow for multiple histories of this field to emerge. It was emphasised that the goal is not to create one ‘canon’ or ‘history’ but rather to make visible, to create understanding, and foster engagement. Who has the power to build a canon; and is it possible for those power structures to foster a digital art canon, or is another approach required? As Dieter Daniels mentions, this project could make visible the pioneers that were overlooked because they were not fitting into the current system of art history and preservation. Thirdly, this leads to the idea that the digital art canonisation process could be an innovative one, which uses the digital technologies and practices from the field in order to create a more participative and collaborative process.
Participants
Josephine Bosma, Gaby Wijers, Sanneke Huisman, Jan Robert Leegte, Axelle Van Wynsberghe, Zlatan Szakacs, Robin Yerles, Sonja Lesniak, Elizabeth Iskandar, Katie Hawthorne, Lia Carreira, Yannick Antoine, Jeon Dohee, Ellen Bokkinga, Jarl Schulp, Angelica Schmitt, Sabine Himmelsbach, Dieter Daniels, Inke Arns, Katherine Shawthorne, Valerie Perrin, Sakrowski, Karin Ohlenschläger, Erik Axel Eggeling