The Digital Creativity Conference (staged in Tokyo by British Council on 12-13 February 2011) asked what are the new opportunities created by digital technologies, for art practice, and art institutions.
My view is that today digital culture has burst its banks, and digital organisations and artists can have ever greater impact, and are working in agile, entrepreneurial ways, often working fluidly across culture, RND, business, and other sectors.
After Bill Thompson opened with a keynote on the future of art and technology, I spoke about digital innovation, and how art organisations can become active in this area, focusing on the work of FutureEverything and how it has grown from an art and festival company, to an organisation active in digital innovation.
The conference also explored we can we move beyond a binary opposition between art and commerce, not to undermine the distance and autonomy of art from industry, but to help to shine a light on the many different strategies people are adopting in the grey area between the two.
There were many inspiring Japanese artists and companies taking part, such as Rhizomatiks who include the incredible Daito Manabe and are doing amazing work in both art and the commercial sector.
Daito Manabe reflected the two sides of the coin, commenting that there is greater freedom with no immediate client, and also noting that commercial jobs can inspire creativity, and feed back into the art.
We also heard from Clare Reddington, Duncan Speakman and Jim Richardson on important work taking place in the UK, and a roll call of leading Japanese artists, organisations and curators, from Fumio Nanjo, Director of Mori Art Museum, to Akiko Takeshita from YCAM and media artist Kazuhiko Hachiya.
There is digital creativity everywhere, but is it Art?
What is different or distinctive about digital creativity and media art is that everything can be copied, remixed, programmed, networked. Time will tell if such characteristics will become integral to all forms of art and innovation, or produce mature forms that have their own, separate life and history.
Boundary-breakers are taking art outside of itself, on a voyage. Such digital creativity is not outside art, or without it, but ‘outwith’ art. Media art has long had an uneasy relation with the art world. Lets take art in a new direction, and lets run hard and fast with it, to see where we can go.
Fumio Nanjo, Director of Mori Art Gallery, caught the mood of the conference saying what we see today is that “art is expanding its own territory”. I earlier had found Nanjosan and I both shared a debt to the idea of art as social sculpture from Joseph Beuys.*
In Japan, media art includes Japanese video game culture, manga, and anime. An example is Device Art, in which artists create devices which are both artworks and commercial, mass produced products. FutureEverything presented the first fully realised live performance using the TENORI-ON by Toshio Iwai and Yamaha in 2006, which led to Yamaha presenting the world-wide launch of the product not in Japan but in London and Manchester in partnership with Futuresonic.
In Europe, the media art tradition emerged out of video art, and critically explores relations between art, society and technology.
Japanese media art has a history of seamless engagement in commerce, and a closer relation to craft than in Europe. It is ‘critical’ in its own way, in its playful distance from its corporate brothers and sisters.
The digital age is still young, it is open to debate what will be its canonical works, we should postpone the desire to fix rigid catetories and taxonomies. Perhaps we should name art movements in the way we use tags to categorise other forms of information, folksonomies not taxonomies.
But there is a place for discipline, deep immersion in a single specialism. This may be why there are such strong resonances between still maturing digital artforms searching for meaning, and more established fields such as architecture, which so often adds to a rich conversation.
Some aspects of digital culture are without any doubt transforming art and society on a deep level, such as open source, both as a philosophy enshrined within some artworks, and as part of a general shift in how we view intellectual property.
The conference talked about how the era of one person, or one organisation, doing one thing at a time is over, and how this presents challenges and opportunities.
When you work in new ways, with people outside your sector, you need new ways to articulate what you do, what you are passionate about. Can you put into words, simply and succinctly, how you change your input into your output, the nature of your value proposition? This is an act of translation, decoding it for others, and it is also a creative act, opening new pathways, writing our collaborative future.
This takes us to new collaborators, and new audiences.
People talk a lot about active participants, “the people formerly known as the audience”. Often forgotten, but always there, are the lurkers. They are the “invisible audience”, and they are changing everything. Like the dark matter that makes up most of the universe, their gravitational pull is shaping online life.
Digital audiences might not always interact with you directly, they may not want to share their info. We get to ‘know’ digital audiences in new ways, not face-to-face, or by asking direct questions, but by scraping the web, a very different kind of relationship, and intelligence.
It is important to be agile in the ways we work and the tools we use. It is also interesting to use conventional and everyday technology, so that the technology disappears and we can take away the fear of a new technology which can otherwise inhibit people.
There are not only opportunities, but also many challenges created by digital technologies, for art practice, and art institutions. Preserving artistic autonomy can be difficult in commercial partnerships. There will be challenges to cherished concepts and ways of working. New models of training and evaluation are needed. Agility, speed of change, and breaking silo-thinking can terrify people in the public sector or traditional companies.
One exampe of how art and curatorial practice has changed at FutureEverything is Climate Bubbles (2009).** This was developed in the Environment 2.0 digital innovation lab. It involved not a conventional gallery installation but ʻkitsʼ for people to use at their own time and place. And the “artists” included a Met Office scientist and the festival curator, myself, breaking my own golden rule to keep my art practice separate from the festival I run.
Unlike the usual cultural conversation in the UK, there was a feeling of optimism and hope at the Digital Creativity Conference. There was a sense that there are many creative opportunities out there, a burgeoning digital culture, and a need for a new generation of cultural leaders who can navigate challenging times.
Drew Hemment, February 2011
* We may also both have read ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ by Rosalind Krauss (October, spring 1979).
** Drew Hemment, Alfie Dennen, Carlo Buontempo (2009) ‘Climate Bubbles’, Environment 2.0, Futuresonic 2009 (FutureEverything) http://futuresonic.com/09/env20 (Accessed February 2011)
