Technology and ‘the death of Art History’
CHArt ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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Technology and ‘the death of Art History’
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Rod Dioso
Digital Art in the ‘Third World’ Context of the Philippines
The emergence of new digital technologies alongside the growing number of global
diaspora communities is reinventing national identity as well as the artistic modes for expressing this identity. This paper proposes connections between digital and diaspora art as well as a re-examination of a history of digital art that emphasizes a linear Euro/American origin based on science and technology.A historiographical analysis of the emergence of digital art in the context of developing nations will be used to discuss transnational narratives and their influence on new media.
Diaspora art of the 1990s gained mainstream recognition alongside computer generated art. Institutional acceptance of work such as Douglas Davis’ The World’s First Collaborative Sentence (1994) by the Whitney Museum of American Art occurred at the same time as the validation of identity art. Like Davis’ pioneering ‘Net art’, post-colonial themes in the work of Guillermo Gómez-Peña challenged the boundaries of the art establishment.This paper will pay special attention to digital art in the context of the Philippines. The ways in which Philippine artists gained mainstream acceptance in previous decades will be presented as a precursor to the diffusion of digital art from the Philippines. Most notable of these earlier artists is David Medalla (b.1942). Medalla co-founded London’s Signal Gallery, the centre for art/science experimentation and kinetics in the mid 1960s. He is responsible for creating international lines of exchange that have since opened up the British art scene. In the 1990s, Manuel Ocampo brought the Philippine narrative to the American forefront with his transgressive paintings of ‘savage’ colonial scenes. Along with Gómez-Peña, Ocampo and to some degree even Medalla presented the post-colonial/colonized artist as a disturbance to the institution.
ASEUM 2009, an international symposium of new media artists and researchers initiated in the Philippines and Slovenia, is a contemporary example of transnational discourse through digital art. This collaboration circumvents the hegemonic art establishment. Online communities around open source projects like Pure Data, as well as more academic digital communities such as rhizome.com, represent a new wave of organized collaboration that circumvents traditional methods of recognition by curators and galleries of the analogue art world.