Digital Art-Is it unresolved? Is it an opening for a cultural voice?

Clark, Oiticica, Pham.

The following vocabulary from the text is what I found to be highly thematic not only in the text, but also in my introductory level interpretation of the Interactive Arts: participation, body-based, action-based, telecommunication space, optical-formal, immaterial.  From other digital art classes of the same spirit, I gathered: generative, kinetic, behavioral, performative.

I am interested in the non-distinct state of the work and the complex aesthetic values found within the work's openness seemingly "inherent" by the themes addressed.  I want to pose the question, "How is interactivity resolved as an art form? Or, how does its disclosure contribute or comprimise its aesthetic values?"

Interactive arts is not a new form, nor is it an old form.  I consider it young.  I also consider it a form of sculptural practice, taking flight.  As interactive media is contributing and changing aesthetic sensibilities and artistic realities, it is easy to be skeptical of its growing merit.  For instance, looking back upon the works previously studied in this course, Matthew Barney, Rebecca Horn, Joseph Beuys, I understand this work as having existed before my experience with sculptural practice.  These artists have already established their sensibilities.  The way their works fulfill their theories has already become a vision embraced by other artists and institutions, and when I myself create work, it is made within their shadows.  Themes of time and space, metaphysical exploration, language, culture, science, society and reality are probed by post-modern art, the work of this era still enthusiastic on the search for purity.  

I accept the search for purity in art because it is emotionally and artistically valueable, however it creates a skepticism for interactive arts.  The problems I have found with digital arts is within a reality shared between the physicality of the artwork and my own tastes.  Throughout the article, "immateriality" is the word used to characterize this growing digital aesthetic.  While immateriality is completely interesting to me, my focus in sculptural sensibilities find interactive arts to be unresolved.  How is walking into a behavior-aware environment controlled by machines as potent as a meditative duration of an icky fat performance by Joseph Beuys?  Does art lose merit as it moves away from direct contact or command of reality?  Do you find piano more artistic than techno? Sometimes, I find that participation and interfacing have not gone far in the art experience, again, my skepticism exists because this form is still young.

The closure of many interactive works I have seen are so current, I myself am included in this aesthetic dimension, I am responsible for contributing to these developing values, and I can only dinstinguish aesthetic value that I have grown from.  

In the youth of interactive media, there is an oppurtunity for a cultural voice, as this field explores bodies, language, space, and metaphysical experiences in a way that welcomes world cultures.  The text itself confirms the fertility of body-based digital arts for the cultural experience, describing western aesthetics to privilege visual and metaphyiscal knowledge, while in Afro-Indigineous oral traditions in which knowledge and history are encoded in the body and ritual is profoundly concrete (280).  Encoded.  

More coming...