what is digital art’s patina?

AMUSE BOUCHE

Contemporary Art is an individual’s expression in reaction to the times and society they live in. It is a reflection of their understanding of reality – emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. It is a social snapshot, told through the lens of that artist.

But human beings are inherently mortal creatures, with limited time on the planet, and even less time to understand their planet. Time is a primordial and primitive element of our lives, and a foundational condition of our reality.

PRIMI PIATTI

I was recently asked in a Clubhouse room about the preservation of digital art – how can we ensure that the digital file/performance/expression will remain accessible to future generations, considering how quickly file formats become obsolete?

My answer is this essay.

Look at street art. By its nature — guerilla, often illegal, assertive, and often clever in reaction to current events — it is almost by design intended to be short-lived, appearing on property or the streets, for days, weeks, maybe a few years, but then it is gone. Compare this to the Lascaux Caves (15,000 years old), or the Urfa Man statue (11,000 years old), or even Michelangelo’s David statue (500 years old). These very physical artworks were the then-contemporary representations of life and have survived weather events, wars, and looting. A Banksy artwork, meanwhile, has a hard time not shredding itself.

The ephemerality of certain artworks lends them additional scarcity, and sometimes even additional intellectual rigor when they are made to comment on ephemerality itself (or the art market’s mercenary capitalism). Sometimes the media that art is made in is time-resistant, like marble. Sometimes the media ages differently, like an 18th Century silver teapot stamped with the mark of a Royal Warrant. In this case, a fine patina may accrue on the art, showcasing its aging and wear as something prized, yet used, and removing a patina in an effort to shine the teapot may actually decrease its value to the art market because you remove the evidence of its place in its contemporary’s daily reality.

So what is the timelessness of digital art? What is its cultural shelflife?

SECOND COURSE

Does digital art have a patina?

“Digital” as a tool evolves very rapidly. This is good because then our digital tools are constantly improving our productivity in knowledge work. When it comes to the arts, digital tools are very rapidly evolving their ability to accurately represent reality. Basic Photography kicked off this memesis in the 19th Century, and film improved upon this in the 20th. But now, in the early 21st Century, our digital tools are creating 360-degree photos and videos, 3D models and representations of physical objects and places, and immersive VR and AR environments that are near photo-real. And this fidelity of reproduction of our reality is improving every year, so for modern day contemporary artists and collectors, digital art is typically scene as more accurately capturing a view on a reality than ever before. We even have legitimate discussions around creating “digital twins” of our world and-more fantastically-digital twins of ourselves, uploaded into some digital state in the not-so-distant future.

So for many, the question of preservation of digital art seems like a natural extension of this evolution of digital reproductions towards permanence, towards digital immortality – can the art that represents reality exist forever? Can our digital twins have an immortal life?

EL POSTRE

No.

No, digital twins can’t live forever. Let’s visit The Long Now Foundatios, where stalwarts of the early internet era like Stewart Brand, Esther Dyson, Chris Anderson, Kevin Kelly, Mitch Kapor, and Paul Saffo, among many others, are designing a system of cultural storage to last 10,000+ years, which is well short of immortal. Is this collection of luminaries, engineers, and designers using any digital systems for this storage? No.

Let’s accept digital art for what it is – it is at most a medium duration media that lasts longer than street art, but less time than stone. It is perhaps on par with well-cared-for painted canvas – surviving as long as the caretakers have the skill and means to preserve and keep up the media; but at some point, it will just break down even under the best of care. Pixel resolution will fade as screens and viewports increase resolution… File types will become unsupported as computer languages evolve… Hardware will malfunction, parts will become un-sourceable… Interface devices will become foreign… Energy sources will sour... Data storage modules will not keep up with data transfer systems of the future…

At some point, the patina of digital art will simply be a sense of quaintness as a relic of past marvels. And it will spark out of view.

And this is fine, mortal humans. Nature will outlast our culture. But do paint our culture for as long as the light shines bright and the pixels are perfect.