Art in a Digital Media World
"In dark times the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness"
David Foster Wallace
(Burn J. Stephen, Conversations with David Foster Wallace, 2012)
In 1918 the world was at war. News media within the Allied countries and the Central powers were trying to keep the morale amongst the troops high, therefore a wartime censorship has been implemented. One of the few neutral countries in Europe, Spain, has granted its media freedom during these turbulent times and subsequently was the first one to report of a new influenza outbreak that appeared in late May. And while the deadliest pandemic in the modern human history did not start there, those first reports created the myth of its origin. The name Spanish flu started being used once the threat was acknowledged and remains part of history to this day. The detrimental effect on economies and the devastation of the human loss the pandemic brought to societies worldwide was overshadowed by the raging war. Somewhere amongst all the death, desperation, isolation and horror of both the war and the pandemic very few art was created but cultural artistic movements were emerging and efforts were made to catch the pulse of the times.
Probably the most notable pieces of art recalling the pandemic are the trio of portraits Egon Schiele did of his mentor Gustav Klimt at the morgue of the Vienna General Hospital and also his painting "The Family". The latter was meant as a depiction of Schiele himself, his wife and their unborn child. Before he could finish it his wife, 6 months pregnant at the time, was taken by the flu and Schiele followed her few days later. Few years back I had the chance to see it in person at the Belvedere in Vienna and you can feel both the desperation of the times and all the hope Schiele held for the future.
"The Family", 1918 (Egon Schiele, 1890-1918).
Another one who dwelled on the way the pandemic was affecting the world was Edvard Munch. He produced two self-portraits named " Self - Portrait with the Spanish Flu" and " Self - Portrait after the Spanish Flu" depicting the disease and representing his obsession with the drama of human existence as such.
"Self-Portrait with the Spanish Flu", 1919 (Edvard Munch 1863-1944).
From the distance of time the most obvious reason for little to none artistic efforts made to bring the pandemic to the pages or the canvas was World War I. The global conflict was considered to have political and social implications that will linger long after the pandemic has ended, therefore it took precedence, and far more efforts went into that direction. While the literary and the visual artistic representations of the pandemic might not be a lot, the absurdity of the times united artists around that sense of the world and few artistic movements emerged as a result. The Dada movement is probably the most notable one and it is regarded as the beginning of what we came to know as contemporary art. While it is considered to have emerged as a result of the horrors of the war, the pandemic happening at the same time made life unreal enough for artists to unite around the nihilistic idea of anti-art. Their aim to create a new form of art, to change the perception of what art actually is and to replace the notion of how art should be created in the first place opened the doors to a lot of artists previously dismissed - what they were creating did not fit the narrative of how we should look at and understand art, what should we accept as artistic effort in the first place. The world seemed so hopeless, full of chaos and when the pandemic was added to the mix of political and social turmoil for a lot of artists that was too much to be represented in the usual creative ways of their operation. The known forms of art were no longer enough for them to express the feeling of getting lost in the insanity of the world. The movement was nihilistic by its nature but despite that I have always seen some hope they still held for humanity with their approach, aiming to bring to the people a vision of a new world, a revolution of its own kind. Escaping reality through abstraction became their way to go along with the changing world while being the change altogether. Around the same time the beginning of the Bauhaus movement was happening and the idea that you can achieve unity of arts in only one piece started shaping the world of art and culture in a completely new and exciting way. Yet back in time the road from creating a piece of art and it subsequently reaching any, let alone wider, audiences was a long one. Certain art works, considered masterpieces today, have been brought to the attention of critics and the public years after they were created. It took " Mona Lisa" around 300 years to be displayed in the Louvre Museum. Hilma af Klint started creating her abstract paintings around 1906. Convinced that the world is not ready for her and with no access to personal display areas, she kept almost all of them private and they began seeing the light of day no early than the 1980s. Today she is considered by the critics one of the most important artist of the last century and probably the earliest artist to adopt abstract art as a form of expression.
Forward around 100 years and we find ourselves living in times just as surreal in their own way. At the end of 2019 information started appearing regarding a new respiratory virus that has originated in China and is spreading faster than anticipated, prompting the World Health Organisation to start paying close attention to the situation. Covid-19, a type of corona virus, became the leading news in the next few weeks and by the beginning of 2020 it was already clear this is getting serious. By March most of Europe entered a quarantine regime and national lockdowns were imposed. On 11th of March 2020 WHO declared the outbreak of Covid-19 a pandemic, which means that the virus has spread worldwide. Millions of people were left in isolation, not allowed or not willing to leave their homes for weeks. Yet this was so different from the pandemic at the beginning of the last century. Through digital media technologies, and how they evolved and became a big part of our lives, we were alone, but still able to communicate with each other. Still with access to numerous media platforms where we can express how we feel in different ways - making a video about it, posting pictures or simply pitting how we experience this in words for the whole world to see. I strongly believe that social media platforms and the humanity increasing engagement with each and everyone's online presence has been taking its toll on the way we live our lives. In this case however I came to appreciate the chance I was given to stay connected with the people close to me and with the world. We were all in a shared reality by going through similar experience. Needless to say, the pandemic was a major inspiration for a lot of artists and this time they didn't have to wait to display their work out there. In the world of media convergence, we have instant access to seemingly everyone, everything, everywhere. In the summer of 2020 one of the most impressive efforts on the subject emerged and showed how much digital media technologies have actually affected the way art nowadays is created and distributed. No Place like the Future managed to capture reality and present us with all the possible futures waiting for us after the pandemic. We just had to decide which one is ours. The idea behind the project is that the pandemic made us question our entire way of life and face the reality that, once we overcome this, things might never be the same. Yet there is no place like the future if we accept that any possible future waiting for us on the other side of the pandemic will not just happen - we create it. And there has never been a better time to stop and decide where to from now on. What is the future we want for ourselves, our children, our societies and our planet. The project was brought to life by the Austrian Embassy and the Austrian Cultural Forum in Washington DC, the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York, the Austrian Consulate General in Los Angeles and Open Austria, Austria’s innovation office in Silicon Valley and combines the efforts of Austrian and American artists. They were put in pairs and, after an initial dialogue about what the future holds after the pandemic, they were given a month to embark on their mutual artistic journey and emerge on the other side of it with a vision of a better , worse or at least different future for all of us. The whole process took place virtually, with some of them in strict isolation which prompted them to be extremely innovative in the way they create their projects, using only their immediate surroundings.
The full list of submissions and the project can be accessed here: No Place like the Future
While each and every of the final submitted projects are just as impressive, the one I found to resonate with me most was "Contagious Whisper" by Manu Luksch and Scott Kildall. I am probably biased as I have been following Manu Luksch's career for a while now and her documentary "Dreams Rewired", narrated by Tilda Swinton, is one of my favourite movies. In a way I see "Contagious Whisper" as a natural progression of some of the ideas she implemented in "Dreams Rewired". The description of the short movie they created only made me even more excited to watch it as soon as it was released - "When the Hyper Age of accelerated online life ends with an Infodemic, and causes the collapse of civilisation, bioengineer Symbia begins developing a new communication network based on the memovirus. It infects people with information – harmless for people’s health but transformative of their minds. As the dominant TechCorps will be aware that the memovirus threatens their rule, desert rebel Durango’s mission to track down a missing crucial component is very risky – will he succeed and help the uprising?
Scott Kildall (Durango) shot the desert footage during the COVID-19 pandemic while camping on public land near the Salton Sea and Slab City. Manu Luksch (Symbia) created her sci-fi sequences by recruiting cast and team amongst family and neighbours, who she is in lockdown with in Europe."
After seeing it I could not help but wonder how accurate this notion of the future really is. We live in the age of disinformation, anti - intellectualism and virtual reality in my opinion. As grim as it sounds, I have hope though that we will come to our senses. We also live parallel lives - in the real world and online, often not distinguishing the two, or prioritising the persona we create for everyone to see over who we really are and how we really feel. This short movie feels equally dystopian and hopeful. It is also a good representation of how far we have come with the digital media technologies today - while not all of us will have the best idea, most of us can create, produce and distribute almost instantly whatever is on our minds. The options of software we can use are growing every day, each generation that comes next is accelerating the timeline of using digital tech and making content. We have the unique chance now to slow down and reflect on all those things, on life itself. Are we going to take it is up to each and every one of us.
Reference List:
Contagious Whisper - a film by Scott Kildall and Manu Luksch (2020) YouTube video, added by Manu Luksch (Online). Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf7V6RTYSJE&feature=emb_logo (Accessed August 2020)
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