[spectre] Making the Digital Divide Cheap and Nasty.

[marc]

Sorry for any cross posting...

Making the Digital Divide Cheap and Nasty.

By Robert Jackson.

Jackson responds to Claire Bishop's new essay Digital Divide, where she 
asks why the contemporary mainstream Artworld has, for the most part, 
continued to disavow any critical dialogue with the 'endlessly 
disposable, rapidly mutable ephemera of the virtual age'. While the 
questions Bishop poses are welcome and expertly framed for the 
mainstream art world, Robert Jackson argues that her call for 
confrontation has no relevance, when measured up to the sphere of "new 
media art" (Bishop's words) which is in a more advanced stage of 
critique with its messy materials.

"Of worthy mention is the essay Digital Divide by the art world's 
antagonistic critic of choice Claire Bishop, a writer whom a little 
under 8 years ago, deservedly poured critical scorn over the 
happy-go-lucky, merry-go-round creative malaise that was Bourriaud's 
Relational Aesthetics and all of the proponents involved. Since then 
Bishop's critical eye has focused on the acute political antagonistic 
relationships, within the dominant paradigms of participatory art and 
the concomitant authenticity of the social."

http://www.furtherfield.org/features/articles/making-digital-divide-cheap-and-nasty

Robert Jackson, is currently studying an MPhil/PhD at the University of 
Plymouth, in the research group KURATOR/Arts and Social Technologies, 
Faculty of Arts and Media (formally Faculty of Technology). Jackson's 
thesis focuses on Algorithmic Artworks, Art Formalism and Speculative 
Realist Ontologies, looking at digital artworks which operate as 
configurable units rather than networked systems, and attain independent 
autonomy themselves which are capable of aesthetics, rather than any 
supposed primary function as communicative, rational tools. There are 
two working titles, Algorithm and Contingency: Towards a Non-Human 
Aesthetics and Everything is Possible: Art and Speculation.

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