Join us at Themes+Projects for the opening night of Deep Time Digitality curated by Chris Truemen and Grant Vetter.
Artist Statement
In the twentieth century culture has entered into a collective condition known as Deep Time Digitality (DTD). Film, photography, books, music, and nearly every other form of analogue communication have been commuted into digital formats over the course of the last few decades and this general tendency shows no signs of slowing. While Fredric Jameson defended the idea that Postmodernism was synonymous with the logic of late capitalism just a generation ago, today Seb Franklin has claimed that digitality is the cultural logic of the fourth industrial revolution known as the Internet of Things (IoT). The artists included in this exhibition are all dedicated to exploring this transformation in a myriad of different ways, from subverting the conventions associated with digital motifs to challenging what the “logic of culture” means in the age of neoliberalism.
Towards this end, the work in DTD is in dialogue with different ideas of how digitality has evolved over time, including how digital technologies have already passed through the five classic phases associated with the Gartner Hype Cycle. This phenomenon consists of valorizing a unique innovation, which then leads to a peak of inflated expectations as well as its counter-movement in the form of a sense of disillusionment, only to be followed by the acceptance of a “slope of enlightenment” with regard to the realistic potential of any new invention to reconfigure culture, industry, etc. In the final phase of the Gartner Hype Cycle, we hit a plateau of productivity with regard to the full incorporation of any new product into the realm of daily living as it becomes a naturalized part of commerce and exchange. In the art world, this same cycle is represented by the rise of digital art, the birth of The New Aesthetic, the sustained discourse around Post-digital aesthetics, and the development of blockchain technologies and NFTs, all of which created an entrée into the moment of Deep Time Digitality associated with the 2000-teens and 2020s.
Thinking about aesthetic experience in Deep Time requires us to see how any object exists in relation to broader transitions in artistic production that carry us from the earliest impulses to inscribe images on cliffs and cave walls to the sprawling frescoes of church cathedrals or the long expanse of time that exists from the mutability of Renaissance easel painting to the magnanimous rise of the modern art market. Today, we are encountering a new genealogy of art history that begins with the spread of computational aesthetics, video art, and internet art, but which ultimately leads to the explosion of the NFT market and blockchain technologies. Thinking in Deep Time allows us to see how all of these historical transitions inform, influence and intersect with one another because the impulse to provide a record, a trace or even a “file” of creative work is still a record of human existence and expression, be it archaic, tribal, mythical, modern, or postmodern.
Afterall, the idea of the Deep Time as it was coined by media scholar Siegfried Zielinski, introduces us to a new vocabulary not only of how we think about art, but also of how we talk about artifacts. When we think about this concept in relation to the work in DTD, it is the notion of artifacts, or really of the practice of artifacting, that this group of artists has set out to explore in the fullest possible measure. Data-bending, glitch effects, dithering and banding, code-bending, and so much more have become new terms for how we encounter the Digital as a dispositif. Taken together, the idea of Deep Time and Digitality has to do with a new kind of immersiveness that presents us with a complex sense of history as well as the experience of losing time when a moving-image unfolds before us, enfolds our sensibilities and circumscribes our faculties.
As a response to the increasing capture and conscription of our attention, the artists included in Deep Time Digitality have set out to explore the contradictory regime of aesthetic experience that has more to do with the advent of neuro-art history, our cognitive carrying capacity and our collective ability to process the density of real-time imagery, not to mention its reversibility, playability and future prospects. Such a dramatic shift in how we cognize the world around us can only lead to greater sense of awareness between the intersection of the virtual and the real, “meta” life and events IRL, avatar experience and an embodied sense of knowing. DTD sits at the intersection of all of these concerns while not reducing the dialectic tension between Deep Time with the surface effects that characterize the commodification of contemporary experience.
On view to the public from July 15 to September 2, 2022