Digital Arts: An Introduction to New Media
University of Oxford (UK)
Digital Arts is a joint effort from Australian scholars Cat Hope (a composer, whose work I’ve admired from afar for a while) and John Ryan, and is presented very much as an introductory reader to some of the central theoretical and practical issues surrounding new media art. The overall narrative thread—if one can call it that—of the book’s nine chapters is one of humanising; tracing a historico-cultural journey from digital art’s inception in the 20th century towards its impact on both the art world and broader society.
Throughout the book, Hope and Ryan forge a delicate path between the need for taxonomy and clarity (it being a textbook, after all) and the more ephemeral and open discussions needed for such a mobile and trans-disciplinary topic. The opening chapter in particular is a stroke of genius in this respect, presenting the context of digital art as a cartography—a brilliant alternative to either the repertoire-based canonic approach taken by Cox and Warner (2004) or the techno-centric focus of Demers (2010). This mapping of the various historical and aesthetic points which make up the various networks of ideology, theory and practice that define digital arts is impressive not least in its breadth but also its depth, demonstrating clearly yet efficiently—the book is only 218 pages long—how such communities of thought came to be. The balance between mapping a broad field whilst providing concrete examples (in handy little boxes) and reflecting on some of the related key debates, both inside and outside the field, is a central concern throughout the book, and on the whole is achieved successfully, even if the authors’ conclusion that this complexity makes digital arts as a genre impossible to define (3) feels a little easy.
Through the main body of the book, Hope and Ryan unfold a methodical examination of the “digital effect” on key areas of artistic endeavour: photography and film (chapter 3), theatre and dance (chapter 4), music (chapter 5), and finally the sui generis medium of digital web art (chapter 5); all underpinned by a series of helpful case studies on specific artworks, with accompanying mock essay questions masquerading as “reflections”. The fifth chapter on digital music will probably be of most interest to readers here. Passing by the obvious theoretical starting point of Benjamin (Hope and Ryan use his seminal “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” as the basis for their discussion of photography instead), this chapter is framed around the relationship between technological advancement, genre expansion and—by proxy—the expansion of musical scenes that these new forms of digital production and consumption create. Their opening section of background traces this “drastic change ... [in] the direction of music” (104) back to serialism, via musique concrète, of course, before moving through a heavy discussion of the nature of digital synthesis into a light one on some of the tools of digital music production and compositional practices associated with electronic music.
Whilst readers of this review are guaranteed to know their digital audio workstations from their digital interfaces, I can see how such a basic introduction would be useful to students, nicely peppered as it is with nods to the changing nature of creative processes that these technologies foster. An unfortunately brief discussion of liveness in electronic music—it doesn’t even include the obligatory line about DJs checking their emails!—leads to possibly the most compelling section of the chapter, discussing the aesthetic issues of digitally-created music and the interesting tension between its presence in both experimental art and popular culture. Maybe in a future publication or revision of this book, Hope and Ryan might consider extending this section even further, perhaps considering some of the social relationships these art practices form commentaries to (for example noise art as a critical reaction to technological acceleration) or the new move in electronic sound art towards an engagement with the post-human (in works such as Guy Ben-Ary’s cellF, which uses a biological neural network growing in a Petri dish to control an array of analogue modular synthesizers in order to create a “neural synthesiser”).
The book’s concluding chapters focus on distribution practices, including discussions of downloading, file-sharing and creative commons (chapter 7), and archival preservation of digital material (chapter 8). Whilst these are some of the most prosaic topics of the project, the concluding chapter (9) is a particular highlight, replete with a rich discussion of the political and ethical dimensions of digital arts and the role of social media (including non-traditional networked environments like online gaming) in the interface that digital practices offer between the artistic and social. Looking back a few years after the publication of this book, it is clear that this is one of the most important issues facing digital arts: that of the role art can play as a catalyst in creating the prerequisite conditions necessary to enable social innovation and change, breaking down barriers and opening up a new potential way to democratize the arts (157).
After the cartographic gestures of the introduction, these latter chapters feel more like Deleuzian tracing, gathering together ideas on a teleological journey towards an alluring sense of completeness, than cartography. Given the spiralling of this book towards a final concluding chapter on hyperrealism in digital art, this movement from mapping to tracing seems to be no coincidence, perhaps presenting a subtle meta-critique of the relationship between the fluid nature of digital arts and the pedagogical need to linearize a field which is still very much a boundary-less network space (pace Latour), perhaps even a vulnerable space loosely encompassing a group of discrete disciplines with shared processes but not necessarily goals.
Or perhaps I’m just over-reading it. For all of the tempting allusions to meta-narratives and subtext, the best way I can summarize this book is functional. In general, the language and presentation of ideas is clear, with the exception of a few slightly obfuscated turns of phrase, such as (for example) the claim that digital art is the “ubiquitous part of our vernacular in today’s ever more globalized world” (2). Nevertheless, the central themes Hope and Ryan draw on are extremely well thought through, with useful bullet-point summaries and further reading lists in each chapter providing the backbone to a clear and comprehensive textbook that would sit well at the heart of any university course on digital and new media art. However, whilst there is considerable critical engagement with the material discussed, there is little in the way of the innovation or revelation needed to make this book a real addition to the established body of scholarly material on electronic music. This isn’t to diminish the work at all—it is brilliant in its relevance and succinct accessibility, and I would highly recommend it to anyone teaching a new media art course—but I would definitely welcome a more adventurous work from the brilliant duo of Hope and Ryan.
Benjamin, Walter. 1977 [1936]. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. In Illuminations (trans. Harry Zohn). New York: Schocken Books.
Cox, Christoph and Daniel Warner (eds.). 2004. Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. London: Continuum.
Demers, Joanna. 2010. Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.