Digital Kosuth

When most people talk about digital art, they mean something they made in Photoshop or Illustrator. I don’t deny that these are purely digital creations, but to me they seem more like digital analogs to traditional arts rather than something made using digital mediums. So what is digital?

Art, at its basest form, is a method of communication. A concept is considered, an action takes place which may or may not result in an artifact. The performance or artifact is then inspected and a concept arises in a separate individual. If it’s well done, the received concept is similar to the original intent.

Consider a chair. There are a number of different meanings for the word chair. I will be specific:

chair: noun \‘cher\

1 a: a seat typically having four legs and a back for one person

Definition via Mirriam-Webster.com

There are many different chairs, so I will show you a photograph of a chair:

We could see the actual chair, if we were both in the same room with that chair. The specific chair doesn’t really matter, though, as long as it matches the chair in the photograph, you will have understood the concept given: It’s a chair.

By showing you these different, but clearly related communications of what a chair is, a more full understanding of the concept of the chair is communicated. This is a thorough communication, if a simple one.

Let’s replace Kosuth’s chair with a digital file for making a specific chair on a 3D printer.

The artifact is held in an array of finite states. A separate array holds the instructions for creating a physical representation of the artifact. That representation could be a 2-dimensional image on a screen, or a 3 dimensional object made by a printer.

The array is not the artifact. If we chose to, we could create a matrix of diodes connecting wires that would output the same array of data. The diodes are not the artifact.

We could export the data to a different format suitable for a different set of instructions. Doing this would radically alter the states within the array, meaning neither the order of information, how it is stored, nor the instructions for interpreting it is the artifact.

Like Kosuth, every piece of the whole can be transmitted, replaced, and altered without significantly affecting the artifact itself. The digital medium is a purely conceptual medium and the artifacts we create with it are not objects, but concepts.