CHArt Eighteenth Annual Conference

Lanfranco Aceti, Central St Martins School of Art, London, UK
Getting Laid On The Procrustean Bed: Art Practice In The Digital World, One Man Versus One Pixel

'We have to redirect our misguided focus on preserving media. Our job is not to preserve media; our job is to preserve art. For digital media, that means no more geeks in a room deciding a one-size-fits-all strategy for video, say, or Flash, but a case-by-case analysis of what is important for each work we study. In a word, we need to preserve behaviours rather than media.' (1)

For Paul Virilio the homologation derives from the concept of kinematic energy, and forces society towards 'not only the geometrization of our vision of the world, along the lines of that of the Italian Renaissance perspectivists, but also its digitization, in the reality principle whereby the automatic nature of representations means perception is standardized' (original emphasis).(2)

The standardisation of approaches generates within the art practice a mirror effect which, reflecting the fear of a society similar in shape to a totalitarian globalised corporate power, restates the necessity of a local approach against the global; of a singular eccentric individual against the social homogenisation of the masses. The practice of the fine artist appears to have the 'onus' of stressing the fact that in a totalitarian regime 'discrimination against the outsider' is discrimination against the pixel diversity, therefore against society (my emphasis and ellipsis).

(1) Ippolito, Jon. Cats and Dogs, expanded version of a talk given at the Museum Computer Network conference in Cincinnati on October 26, 2001.

(2) Virilio, Paul. Open Sky, Verso, London, 2000, pg. 45.

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