Panel: On the problem of “digital” in art

Description

The Digital Art in Ireland Symposium (#DigiArt22) is a joint initiative of Sample-Studios and the Department of Digital Humanities at University College Cork, with support from the Future Humanities Institute, UCC.

Funded by The Arts Council of Ireland, #DigiArt22 offers an opportunity to share research and creative contributions within an engaging, collegial atmosphere comprising digital art scholars and practitioners from Ireland and beyond. The symposium will be held in Cork on June 2nd, hosted in The Shtepps in The Hub, University College Cork


Abstract

Any discussion of digital art must be grounded in an honest problematisation of the term. How, then, can we define the digital? Is it simply the idea that reality is mathematically representable? What bearing does this have on the arts practitioner and the digital world she encounters? Contemporary post-digital practices include artistic approaches that often highlight a disenchantment with the digital. Can and should digital art be redeemed?

The debate will seek the active engagement of the audience and will depart from two contrasting views as presented by Dr. Giuseppe Torre (University of Limerick, Ireland) and Dr. Robin Parmar (University of Limerick, Ireland).

Giuseppe Torre wrote:

“Digital means only to discretise a flow of electrons in time so as to count things one wants to give a number to. For digital art practitioners this means something terrible, namely that anything we do is a count – including all of our action through it ... so that at the end of a journey that moves from input to output we come out not recognising ourselves anymore ... because we are not numbers.” (Torre 2021)

Robin Parmar wrote:

“Our anxiety concerning the digital is based on its discontinuous structure. Knowing that digital data streams are composed of ones and zeroes, we follow Zeno of Elea in worrying over the impossibility of integrating a continuous phenomenological experience. [...] My thesis is that such discontinuities are not a new characteristic of digital technologies, but were always already present, not only in previous analogue processes but in our very perceptual apparatus. Corpuscular theory [...] reveals such gaps to be profoundly generative.” (Parmar 2015).

References

Parmar, Robin. 2015. “Digital anxiety dispelled: Granular synthesis and the paradox of discontinuity,” in Jean Baudrillard: Fest für einen Toten, Germany: Ventil Verlag.

Torre, Giuseppe. 2021. An Ethico-Phenomenology of Digital Art Practices. London: Routledge.

Period	5 Jun 2022
Event title	The 1st Symposium on Digital Art in Ireland
Event type	Conference
Degree of Recognition	International