ART IN AMERICA 65
BOOKS
The Digital Dilemma
by Rob Horning
LAUREN CORNELL and ED HALTER, eds.
Mass Effect: Art and the Internet
in the Twenty-First Century
Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2015: 528 pages; $44.95 hardcover, $31.95 e-book.
With the advent of digital communication technology, the real and
the virtual have collapsed into each other. Images now seem like
reality itself, the substance of experience, not just representations of
it. In this so-called Post-Internet condition, any possibility of being
outside the network, in a reality beyond images, is eradicated by
rampant connectivity. We are, in effect, always performing for some
potential audience, even if it is just algorithms parsing our data.
Everyone thus becomes creative via basic everyday interac-
tion with social media. Visual strategies were once the preserve of
artists, but now having an online presence (as simple as owning a
cell phone) means you have an image practice. Digital device users’
motives have become harder to differentiate from those of artists.
Everyday people try to build their reputation and audience, direct
attention flow and create content that accrues value by being seen.
The wide adoption of digital editing and postproduction software
ROB HORNING
is executive editor at
theNew Inquiry.heirst iteration
of Aram Bartholl’s
projectDead Drops,
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lash drive embedded
inabrickwallin
Brooklyn. Courtesy
DAM Gallery, Berlin.lets novices manipulate images in increasingly sophisticated ways.
But what does all this mean for artists?
Mass Effect—a collection of essays, manifestos, interviews
and lectures by 54 contributors, edited by Lauren Cornell
(curator at the New Museum in Manhattan) and Ed Halter
(founder and director of the film and electronic-art venue Light
Industry in Brooklyn)—charts various responses to the increas-
ing erosion of artists’ special economic relationship to creativity.
In their introduction, Cornell and Halter point to a pervasive
sense that the mainstream art world has resisted digitization
and its logic of viral value, instead intensifying its commitment
to aura and exclusion.
Initially, this seemed possible, especially in regard to explicitly
digital artifacts—hacker-inspired computer-lab art that tended to
draw potency from its geeky obscurity. Early digital artists delighted
in making computers serve artistic aims, bending hard-coded utili-
tarian systems to their imaginative whim. Such work, defined by its
outsider nature, was not especially inclusive or accessible. In fact, in
an essay commissioned forMass Effect,Cory Arcangel, a quintessen-
tial Net artist, expresses nostalgia for Web 1.0 and its sense of insider
cool in “a world before moms could email.”