Ekmel Ertan: “Technologies will continue to transform our experience of art, while disciplining us through art.”
Piksel is a training, support and community-building program designed to introduce young artists and aspiring artists from all fields of plastic arts to the genres, production methods, technologies and ways of thinking behind digital skills, and ultimately to help them understand and incorporate digital technology into their workflow. | O’art New Media Residency Program graduates’ “Soft Discipline” group exhibition opens a space for new artists. We talked to curator Ekmel Ertan about the show.
How did the story of “Soft Discipline”, the group exhibition of the Piksel | O’art New Media Residency Program graduates, begin?
I was a member of the jury in the process of determining the participating artists for the Piksel | O’art 2023 semester. I met the artists about a year ago. At the end of the training process, as required by the program, the artists started the production process about six to seven months before the exhibition’s opening. I received an offer from Piksel to curate the exhibition. Since this was a process in which the artists participated, I happily accepted and suggested to the artists that we work together to curate the exhibition. This is a process I have done before, and I call it collective curation. We started working together. We spent a long time together for six months, sometimes meeting thrice weekly. We talked and discussed what we wanted to do, each of our interests and practices, and started to develop the works. It was a gratifying and instructive process for me, and the Soft Discipline exhibition emerged.
Why “Soft Discipline”? How does the importance of discipline come to the fore in the exhibition?
During the collective curation process, we talked a lot about digital technologies, both because of the ground that brought us together (Piksel) and because we are interested in current technologies and problems. The idea for the exhibition came from Imelda. The phrase she used about her research, “technology disciplining the object,” was one of the sentences we all repeated. I wrote the title and the curatorial text on this basis because the artists did not come from a digital formation, and it was the first time they were thinking and working on the relationship between digital technologies and art, both conceptually and practically — at least in this intensity. Of course, they knew how our digital lives have transformed us. Still, when they had to rethink the digital as an art medium and develop new practices, we realised once again how it disciplines the object (maybe also the art object) and how technology and ideology are intertwined. Soft Discipline deals precisely with how digital technologies try to punish us, that is to say, societies, with our consent, super-structurally (soft in this sense), without applying any force, and asks questions about digital technologies and questions the possibility of another approach or approaches.
Since 2007, you have been the local coordinator or director of several European Community-funded international projects related to art and technology. In this respect, “Soft Discipline” is an exhibition where we can follow new directions in digital art as a field of contemporary art. Technologies such as Web3, artificial intelligence, NFT, and VR have started to transform our experience of art. Do you think these are trends or the beginning of permanent changes?
The technologies we produce are changing our lives and, of course, art. Art is a reflection of life. The history of the field we call new media art goes back to the 50s. Still, we started to see and know contemporary media art in a widespread way and with the name modern media art after the 80s, that is, after digital technologies became widespread. But since the 80s, technologies have continued to change (develop?) and become widespread. More artworks are being produced using digital technologies now than in the 80s. It is impossible to call them all new media art, but we can call them digital art. Digital art will fill the field we call contemporary art today; it will replace it, and it is taking its place not only in terms of the use of technology but also in terms of its subject matter. On the one hand, the celebration of technology will continue to increase and take over the field. On the other hand, critical works will be produced to continue the tradition of new media art.
The exhibition questions how technology transforms our bodies, minds and social existence. The works also offer opportunities to experience the digitised results physically. What do you think is the importance of this interactivity?
The interaction with the viewer is present in most but not all of the works in the exhibition. This is not an add-on in any of the results; it is part of the narrative, the medium, and the material of the work. Similarly, the technologies used are like AI, but there are so many layers now that a flat metaphor doesn’t work. Art is different now, and so is the work of art. It is more layered and more profound — an excellent job of art. But this layeredness is not an obstacle to being understood to communicating with the viewer; on the contrary, it facilitates and expands.
How many works by which artists do we encounter in the exhibition?
There are ten works by nine artists in total.
NFTIFY, as a site that analyses the works produced in digital art, we would like to ask what you think is the role of NFTs in this field.
NFTs have been influential in the field of art in two ways. First, it was necessary as a certificate of ownership and a record of the movement of the work, and it suggested a new form of relationship between the parties (the producer of the work, the owner of the work and the user of the work — the audience). This meant automatising platforms like Müyap that today try to protect copyrights for digital productions. We will see how widespread it can become, how much it will benefit the parties, and how effectively it can be used in non-digital works, but it won’t happen soon.
The second was the rise of “NFT art”, which gave visibility to new styles through digitally produced visual works, especially contemporary artists. This democratised the art world in a sense, or at least gave hints of it, but in the end, it passed very quickly, leaving few artists who could move beyond illustration and continue their production. It has also crushed many artists’ — or designers’ — eagerness to make a quick buck. When we say “NFT art”, we might be referring to the period of the rise of NFT as a movement, which should be the subject of a serious study; we might be referring to the few new media works that use block-chain and NFT technology as a medium in some cases, we might be referring to the collection of works exhibited on NFT platforms — instead of a kind of gallery — or we might be referring to the style or diversity of types of a group of artists using NFT technology. Still, NFT is not an art form in its own right. The NFT art bubble was an attempt to add value to cryptocurrency. I don’t know how well it worked, but it was also a new medium for money laundering, which also exists in the field of art. But if we leave that bubble aside — I think that period has passed and will not come back — of course, platforms will continue to exist and create a market that is perhaps much more democratic than today’s art market in terms of both producers and buyers.
ESİN HAMAMCI
NFTIFY
This interview was first published in nftify.com.tr in Turkish. The interview was later translated from original to English, and minor changes were made during the translation.
Original Article: https://nftify.com.tr/ekmel-ertan-teknolojiler-sanat-deneyimimizi-donusturmeye-bir-yandan-da-sanat-uzerinden-bizi-disipline-etmeye-devam-edecek/
