Digital Modernity

Digital Modernity

(Critical Analysis) 2014

“There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.” ― Jean Baudrillard, America.

“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.” ― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation.

Our digital reality is documented through a series of images and presented on a series of screens, all of our visual information has been simplified, broken into pixels and cropped into a rectangular format. We ourselves are transformed into data and information and placed within digital groups and sub groups, our digital identity can be accessed by governments or individuals with increasing ease and without apparent cause.

The infinite possibilities entailed within computer science and indeed the internet, have been confined to the limitations of a finite screen. Visual data and information are further condensed into a series of files or thumbnails. Computer, mobile phone, camera lens and windscreen, in this modernity there is no distinction between screens and actuality and little distinction between the information being displayed. Delays in uploading and downloading content (no matter how small) highlight an intrinsic, technological flaw - we cannot visually represent changes in technology in the same instant with which they occur. And it is this lack of real-time representation, where contemporaneous art practices must focus.

Think of the advent of photography or the shift from silent film to sound assisted cinema, how this altered the way art practices were displayed to an audience and the drastic influence they have had on the representation of cultural changes. Today the integration of photography as an auxiliary component in almost all technological devices shows just how reliant we have become on these types of technologies, but this reliance on technologic systems is not yet being presented adequately by contemporary artists.

Our experiences of modern life no matter how subjectively trivial have to be documented visually and incessantly without censorship. Cultural phenomenon such as the Selfie, Trolling and the worrying over-dependence upon social media outlets reveal a narcissistic danger that is inherent within such technologies. The nature of our connectivity has changed enormously over the past two decades, so much so that the digital self (the best possible presentation of oneself, edited and altered) and our actual existence have no correlation, allowing us to completely suspend negative aspects of ourselves for indeterminate lengths of time. We are turned-on and tuned in to digital and technological devices twenty four hours a day, constantly consuming and producing data and information, but how has this changed the nature of society?

YouTube and other file sharing websites are the closest possible representation of change within the digital and actual realities, allowing information to be imparted almost instantaneously, in a way which traditional media simply cannot do; there is a disparity however, between the types of work being created by visual artists to represent contemporary, digital existence and the actual level of that digital engagement. 

The moving image works created by contemporaneous artists should be a deliberate attempt to re-present this dependence on technology and to accurately portray changes in society which have been directly influenced by the level of that engagement.

Violent, anti-social and homophobic imagery which are an ever present aspect of modern visual inter-connectivity, are not something which has emerged as a result of the internet. However the internet has compounded these ideas and provided a platform for people with polarising views to communicate, organise and inflict serious physical and emotional damage upon fragile communities. The increase in this type of content should be viewed as an indicator or precursor of wider societal problems.