View from the Fringe — digital arts show & tell, Tate Britain
The intersection between the arts and digital culture has never been closer. Digital artists are at the forefront of exploring the challenging questions posed by the digital world. Facets of our lives such as self-perception, ownership of culture, identity and privacy are now fluid in a way that we have never experienced before.
Take the work of Antonio Roberts, for example. Antonio specialises in the glitch, taking images and designs, converting them into data, changing the data and reproducing the image in a new form. The new image then appears broken, yet somehow reborn and modern.
Antonio is also interested in the political side of art and remix culture, and the ownership of creative works. He argues that all creative works are, in some way, remixes of earlier ideas and creations because all art is influenced by its predecessors. He makes a particularly powerful point in relation to copyright. In Common Property he creates multiple glitches to form an image of Mickey Mouse, challenging the continued ownership of the work which should by now be in the public domain. This is strongly juxtaposed with the ubiquitous image of Che Guevara which is on everything from t-shirts to mugs, posters to album covers, and yet strictly speaking remains under copyright.
The core theme of Antonio’s work is to explore the point at which we move from remix to rip-off.
He said: “Remix culture is not distinct from culture, it is culture. We only move from remix to rip-off at the point when something is fake and is passed off as something it isn’t, such as counterfeit art and clothes.”
The second artist speaking about her work was Almudena Romero. Almudena works with portraiture and photography and has recently begun to work with images from Instagram tagged as selfies.
She makes the powerful point that while we may not be aware of it, selfies contain many layers of political, social and economic suggestion within them.
Cues such as the device used to take the image and the setting in which it is taken tell us a lot about the person creating the image.
Beyond the apparent simplicity of the selfie, Almudena notes that they have blurred the boundaries between creation and consumption of content because we now do both simultaneously.
Perhaps more importantly, the line between the act of living and the act of recording life is also less distinct. Does this desire to capture a series of events on our devices somehow take away from the moments themselves? This is a question that remains unanswered.
There is a further point that merits discussion. The advent of the selfie allows us to take a much more curatorial approach to our own identity. We have an element of control over how we are perceived by others in the digital space through imagery, and we can create and manipulate the images we believe capture that essence of ourselves.
Almudena argues that technology is changing the way we interpret terms such as memory, personal, private and identity. While photographic technologies have always challenged and changed the way we perceive ourselves, this has accelerated and evolved as the technology has moved on. Watching this evolution over the coming years will lead to some new and important questions about how we see ourselves and our place in the world.
The final piece on display at the event was a deeply thought-provoking video from new media artist and educator Nick Briz. Nick examines the space that social media, especially Facebook, occupies in the digital world. After reflection, he decided that there were plentiful reasons for him to leave Facebook, including the filter bubbles that it helps us to create. He went beyond just deleting his account and set about leaving in his own terms, downloading dumps of his account data and posts, then removing individual images, details and friends until only his video remained. Nick’s video about his reasoning and his experience is much more powerful when viewed without being influenced and you can see it here.
To read other perspectives from the event, search Twitter for #MozFest and #TateExchange. There are a wealth of other digital arts experiences waiting for you at MozFest. If you haven’t got your ticket, you can buy it now!
