"The Aesthetic and Conceptual Digital as Artistic Strategy"

402-406
The Aesthetic and Conceptual Digital as Artistic Strategy – conference paper at Digital Creativity: Computer Aided Design in Education (CADE) conference held at Glasgow University in 2001. It was subsequently published in the e-conference proceedings (ISBN 0901904821).
The researcher’s paper investigated the philosophical underpinnings of the emerging notion of digital aesthetics. A critique of what might be termed ‘digital euphoria’ was mobilised through an analytical encounter with the notions of interactivity and immersion, two themes that remain defining (if rarely examined) principles in the field. Particular focus was brought to bear on the conventional distinction between the digital and its alleged antecedent, the analogue. By unpacking the debates around this analogue-digital pole it was argued that artists who engage with digital technology may operate at the level of instrumental functionality rather than investigating more rigorously any coherent conceptual concerns.

The researcher’s original paper arrived at a timely moment in the evolution of the critical discourse surrounding digital aesthetics. The paper has subsequently been republished a number of times including at the online Netwissenschaft (Net Knowledge) resource (www.netzwissenschaft.de).

A logical extension of the arguments deployed in “Digital Sensitivity” arose when the researcher was commissioned to curate the online exhibition Clickanywhere for the Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP) at the University of the Arts, London. In this exhibition, the researcher played with our conventional ‘point-and-click’ notions of interactivity in the web site’s design and selected artistic work that negotiated alternative conceptions of immersion. (http://clickanywhere.crisap.org/).

The text “The Anxiety of the Lonely Listener” published in the 5th issue of the international peer-reviewed online journal /seconds (ISSN 1751-4134), brings the analysis begun in “Digital Sensitivity” and continued in Clickanywhere full circle, with the analogue-digital divide and notions of interactivity and immersion being shown to remain underproblematised conventions of contemporary digital aesthetics.