At the Edge of Art

The creation of the internet has opened art and design to a new audience and generation; enabling creatives to access a pool of resources for artists to use, which has resulted in the surfacing of new forms of art. ‘The internet is in a strongly metaphorical way the lifeblood of this new creativity.’ (Blais and Ippolito, 2006, p.8.) But the internet expands at the expense of the gallery and the author. ‘The online art community has developed almost entirely outside the purview of Galleries.’ (Blais and Ippolito, 2006, p.8.)

The modern world is continuously expanding with new technologies, and the Internet is responsible for blurring the lines between art and non-art, so art must respond to this new threat acting as an antibody. ‘A virus doesn’t have to defend itself, art doesn’t have to defend itself, it attacks, and if necessary it kills.’ (Blais and Ippolito, 2006, p.9.)

Technology  can easily be compared to a virus through its lack of response to culture. ‘Unlike art but like a virus, technologies often seem indifferent to culture rather than engaged with it.’ (Blais and Ippolito, 2006, p.9.) Technology is always changing and evolving new software, like a virus might evolve into a new strain. ‘The earliest human technology may have been the arrow head, and some of the most recent ones require only the pressing of a few buttons to pound the world’s cities into radioactive rubble.’ (Blais and Ippolito, 2006, p.9.)

Art differs from technology in the fact that it’s responsible to society as antibodies are responsible to the biological form, neither a virus or technology is responsible to the bodies to which they operate. ‘Viruses originate outside a host organism and are interested in that organisms surviving only long enough to enable it to infect other hosts.’ (Blais and Ippolito, 2006, p.10-11.) Art must emulate the antibody in the way that it counteracts a threat by acting similar to it.

In order to survive the best art challenges aspects of society through a range of approaches, much like antibodies ‘the edge of art traces a fine line between life and death.’ (Blais and Ippolito, 2006, p.13.)

To compare art and technology to antibodies and viruses in literal terms is a bad example. Art is not a vital piece of society, it is a luxury we enjoy, and to go into depth about it like this is just inquisitive human behaviour. The only thing art has to protect is itself. Interpreting the text to mean art is protecting itself and not society is more realistic, art is there to ask questions, to make the audience think. However technologies and viruses have similar attributes, as both can be as little as an annoyance to as dangerous as life threatening, however a virus is a contagious disease, and technology is controlled by an operator. To the question of technology being a threat to art, and where the line is that divides the two, there is not an answer. They can stand alone as technology is a man-made tool designed for a purpose and art is something that engages the audience and provokes. These two distinct bodies can however coincide, and when they do combine, they do create an interesting piece which is a hybrid of the two.

Bibliography

Blais, J. and Ippolity, J. (2006), At the Edge of Art, London: Thames and Hudson.