The article posted on Rhizome, titled Artifacts: A conversation between Hito Steyerl and Daniel Rourke is a discussion about the glitch aesthetic, with reference to the western definitions of art, both domestic and international. It suggests a new movement in the aesthetics of computer art; one whose mode of visual perception finds beauty in the decay, the effect of time and travel on a work, in this case a digital artwork. The article explains that a common misconception exists that media remains identical and unchanged as it is transferred, downloaded, copied, compressed and extracted. In reality this changes and mutates unpredictably as its electronic information moves through the constructed "virtual space." The data is changed, and as it moves from address to address, media develops what the article describes as bruises and scars.
The article, as I understand it, suggests that the commodification of digital technology has produced a tangled ball of yarn, quickly interrupting and destroying the origins of information. To popular culture, the line between what is real and what is representational is distorted in regards to digital innovation. Today, in the digital art world, images/artworks/creations are lost in the vast expanses of the web and essentially die quickly, as their stories dissolve and mutate. Their definitions do not travel with them. However, what I can absorb from the article is that their original meaning has no importance to popular culture. To relate the concept to history, the article makes a slight analogy to the lost culture, art, ideas, resulting from imperialist action in less developed regions, including the lost cultural understanding of many of the artifacts which returned to the European empires.
What I can take this to mean is that generations proceeding the creation of the internet have evolved (or devolved) to a distinctly different approach to perception, some of which has been influenced and changed greatly, for better or worse, by the growing use of manipulation, control, and surveillance in emerging digital technologies. These generations, I presume, will be cut off from what was "real" before the internet, and the original derivatives of information will eventually die, rightfully subjecting all further digitally stored information to intense scrutiny and skepticism.
My questions are, as the internet continues to rapidly expand, will proceeding generations be less particular? Will they have the opportunity to successfully distinguish valid information from invalid information? Will a difference between the two exist?
"Am I any closer? Will I ever get there? Does it even matter?"- lyrics from Apocalypse Dreams, by Tame Impala
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