Ages ago, when we still believed in the avant-garde, the sincere
brushstroke and the 40-hour work week, Clement Greenberg held that
painting, freed of its historical role as a representational medium,
would henceforth express its own specific qualities as a plastic substance
applied to a two-dimensional support. The principle that each medium
has its own expressive qualities amounts to a truism, though one long
brandished at art students who strayed from the fold while Abstract
Expressionism held the academy. Nowadays Conceptualism reigns and
truth to one's medium seems of less consequence than truth to one's
theory.
Where digital media are concerned, theory abounds but
one is left to wonder what indeed is the nature of the medium. Bits
and bytes? Or the protean capability of simulating any other medium?
This sounds rather like asking whether the nature of painting is found
in spreading pigment on a support or in representing shepherds in
Arcadia. Or then again, could the nature of the medium be the capability
of those bits and bytes, structured into larger complexes, of deriving
into many distinct media? Back in the early 60s, A. Michael Noll (1),
a pioneer in generative systems, maintained that the artwork was not
the visible object but the process whereby it was created. And indeed,
the authority of digital technology stems from its invisibility.
While there are no doubt works that could only have
been produced by the new digital media, we are surrounded by products
and events that bear no signature of digital origins or mediation,
and yet clearly possess a disembodied digital presence. Our images,
opinions, and vital stats have been harvested into banks of electronic
flesh (2). Almost subliminally, we have acquired a second nature,
created by systems none of us control. In the face of this harvest,
it comes as no surprise that artists strive to assert the possibility
of molding digital media, on however small a scale, to purposes we
can hope to control, thereby reclaiming our colonized selves.
As they confront us with the power of digital imagery
to charm, seduce or simulate, the artists presented in Second Nature
assert this possibility in a variety of ways, from creating systems
that imitate or enclose natural processes to revealing the process
of obsolescence that strikes even this millennial medium, seemingly
beyond decay. We created "nature" by conquering it. Now as we continue
to consume nature we must wonder--will this second nature consume
us? We invite the viewer to contemplate the possibilities.
Paul Hertz, curator
Chicago 1999
(1) Cited in Goodman, Cynthia, Digital Visions,
Henry N. Abrams, Publishers, New York 1987
(2) Kroker, Arthur and Marilouise, "Code Warriors,"
in Clicking In, Hot Links to a Digital Culture, Lynn Hershman
Leeson, editor, Bay Press, Seattle 1996
