Google Space : keep your friends close, but your enemies closer
My career is in digital art. It’s a sometimes controversial, sometimes hugely impactful, sometimes frustrating sub sector of the arts and cultural world. As my colleague Drew Hemment perfectly put it at the opening of FutureEverything this year, we’re “obstinately and resolutely slippery”. There’s a world of problems, and strengths, to that perspective, but it’s the reality we live and work in.
Two of the higher profile controversies of 2014 that ‘got us noticed’ as a sector, were the Digital Revolution show at the Barbican, and the launch of The Space 2.0. First I’m going to try and highlight the ‘received understanding’ in the wider arts world about these two events.
Digital Revolution
The controversy here wasn’t about the show itself, which was incredibly successful. The controversy within the sector was about Google’s involvement, and some possibly cynical, possibly just clumsy, land grabbing and questionable comms messages from Google about ‘DevArt’. More on that later.
The Space 2.0
The Space, for those of you who don’t know what it is (and I’m sure many of you won’t), is a major initiative of Arts Council England aiming to ‘transform the way people connect with, and experience, arts and
culture’. The first version of the Space was focussed on use of technology for broadcast and distribution of art. 2014 saw a second version of the platform being launched, with much more direct ‘creating and commissioning’ aspirations. The Space has commissioned, been involved with, and covered some excellent work over recent months. Things like Together, by Universal Everything, Today and Yesterday by Gustav Metzger, and Loop>>60Hz are all ambitious and excellent digital artworks.
However, there is controversy here, just quieter. Eerily quiet in fact, bar one excellent Guardian article. Very few people spoke out about it, so I may be on dangerous ground saying anything, but believe me, there has been a mixture of frustration, sadness, exacerbation and a little bit of ‘well you have to laugh’ from parts of the cultural sector, and particularly the digital art sector.
On the face of it these two events and associated controversies are entirely different. One sees an extremely powerful corporation sponsoring an art show and being perceived to be overstepping several boundaries in the way they do so. The other sees a national funder setting up an initiative, because they believe it’s the best way to use upwards of £16 million to support and promote engaging with technology in art. My proposition is that the actions of both parties result in parallel and very similar outcomes.
These actions show a lack of understanding of digital art. I believe a key failure here is a failure to properly connect with or engage the artform they profess to support.
Many more experienced and intelligent people have written on and spoken about this before, but to me it’s a little worrying that a national organisation set up to support, promote and develop art, be it digital or otherwise, is causing similar issues to one of the biggest, most aggressive, and most powerful commercial corporations in today’s world. Digital art is not new, by any means. Media art is not new. The use, exploration and interrogation of technology in creative and artistic practice is not new, it’s normal.
Hat tip to Honor Harger at this point, who is exactly the sort of person The Space could do with, but that’s another matter.
Back to Digital Revolution. The core of the controversy around Google’s involvement in Digital Revolution was the furore kicked up when they published their DevArt platform, originally claiming that:
“DevArt is a new type of Art. It is made with code, by developers that push the possibilities of creativity and technology.”
There’s been a lot of discussion as to how and why this happened, and very quickly the messaging was changed on the site, toned down, and made slightly more palatable. Zach Lieberman’s account of the process is most illuminating, essentially pointing to a comms message being skewed by people who aren’t close to the project, and who have an understandably commercial mindset and perspective (Zach had a work in Digital Revolution and is, to the digital art world, a superstar). Some more great, well informed comment on the situation came from Matthew Plummer Fernandez. What Google did is either sloppy or calculated and manipulative. But, in either case, what on earth would we, the Barbican, or the so-called ‘digerati’ expect? Landmark shows like Digital Revolution are what our sector needs to be taken seriously outside the (entirely privileged, granted!) ghetto of makerspaces and openings at University galleries for 30 friends, and hey, they cost money. Real money. The sort that Google has.
In both cases, why oh why do we need to try and claim territory and incessantly define types of art? We seem to be obsessed with categorisation, perhaps thinking that nice neat boxes will help promote and push forward a particular artform.
Sitting at No Boundaries conference in 2014, I was excited to hear about plans for The Space reboot, and heard this:
“I don’t really know what digital art is, we’re going to have to find out.”
No Boundaries is a significant national event, and this was a big stage. £16 million invested into an enormously high profile scheme to support, promote and develop digital art. The leader and figurehead of it had nothing to say when referring to the established practice of digital art. I don’t blame any individual for this at all, I think it speaks to a bigger problem, i.e. what is The Space trying to do?
Over many years I’ve participated in consultations, sandpits, workshops, (the lot) around a variety of sector and strategic issues. The least successful ones, the ones where no ideas emerge, almost always result in ‘a platform’, i.e. a website. Anyone who works in web design, or even in anything approaching the digital sector, will tell you that there’s no point trying to reinvent web infrastructure. The top ten websites visited makes for a familiar list. It includes Google, Youtube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Amazon and Microsoft. That’s the reality of the way people use the internet, and those corporations have billions of dollars. In that world, what impact do you need to have to gain real status as a site that people visit everyday? Why not integrate dynamic and cutting edge art onto and into the infrastructure that is already there?
All this said, The Space can, could, and sometimes does work. They have recently recruited some excellent, knowledgeable staff, commissioned some sometimes excellent work, and if they are able to push the boundaries on the types of work they commission and support (please god no more streamed theatre rehearsals), then we’re onto something. The recent trajectory of their writing, commissions and profile has been enormously improved, and the potential is there. I just can’t help thinking that all of this could have been given a much better chance of success a number of years ago, maybe even before launching Space 1.0.
Tom Higham is Executive Director of FutureEverything in Manchester, UK. Feel free to get in touch by going to his Twitter account.
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