The following is a list of partially-organized thoughts on Digital Divide, a 2012 article by Claire Bishop on contemporary Art and new media.
- Claire Bishop complains that new artists who use digital media aren't responding to their media any more than by simply using it, but is it truly an artist's responsibility to respond to the media that he uses, or is that a modern, unrealistic expectation, a high standard that we now hold artists to in a time in which not knowing or not participating in something is a sort of social offense?
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- Wherever there is new stuff, there are always hipsters, it seems, the inevitable "nostalgic reuse" of old media.
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- In this age in which we vote with page visits and "likes," the separation between consumer and "prosumer" (those who coproduce content) is certainly imagined. What is the Internet but a product of constant revision by its millions of users?
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- To refer to the images's position "in the age of mechanical reproduction" as a plight is short-sighted, in my opinion. The image is simply in a state of evolution; digital art is still so young.
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- Bishop fights the building of "new files from existing components" as Kandinsky fights the use of forms in his work. It is, in fact, impossible to create anything from scratch. To strive for this is like striving for perfection. As a thought exercise, try imagining a new animal, but without using any parts from an existing animal. You'll find yourself stuck, or needing to re-define what an animal is in order to proceed.
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- Hal Foster sees "human interpretation" versus "mechanic reprocessing" in the same way that I see what I call technology-assisted art versus machine-assisted art. He and I both appear to see a separation between subjective and technological.
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- Bishop at first seems to complain that artists aren't responding to the new media that they put to use, but she also makes reference to "a tendency to include more work than the viewer could possibly see" in a gallery set-up. Is this not a direct response to "the possibilities of Internet searchability," an essential part of the use of their new media? Creating a work that includes more than a viewer can handle may be a good experience for the artist creating the work, as the artist is reflecting on an immense new network of information, but works made up of 600 hours of video or 305 postcards, for example, simply overwhelm and intimidate viewers, further alienating the modern artist's audience from modern art.
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- "The digital[…]is[…]inherently alien to human perception" in the same way that life on our moon (and eventually Mars, for instance), is alien to the human body. Like operating in gravity in which our species's body did not evolve is like adjusting to instantaneous communication and the vastness of the Internet, also features of our being with which we did not evolve.
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- I will adamantly defend a positive view of the "digital revolution" as "a new dematerialized, deauthored, and unmarketable reality of collective culture." I see this as the Internet's bight future, and at the moment I am indifferent to "the impending obsolescence of visual art." In this way, the message of the author's last couple of sentences was somewhat lost on me.
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