Digital Divide By Claire Bishop
Digital Divide – by Claire Bishop Response by Lucas Olscamp
Claire Bishop sets out to examine the idea the largely the genre of “digital art” has been ignored and somewhat consciously forgotten by the world of contemporary art. Bishop also suggests that much of the ideology and history behind the “digital revolution” is also reduced, removed, and ignored; that digital art poses the necessary questions to our society today on the “troubling oscillation between intimacy and distance” (1) and that digital art “proposes an incommensurability between our doggedly physiological lives and the screens to which we are glued” (1). Bishop argues her point that not only is the art of the “digital art movement” itself significant, but that so many art movements (performance, social practice, assemblage based sculpture) also owe much of their inspiration and roots in the time of the digital art revolution (2). In reading this I found much sympathy for the role of the digital art in our present-day society and that a possible avenue of ignorance towards it is it’s significance in our everyday worlds, separate from the realm of contemporary art. The mediums of digital art, the tools we have come to advance in a technological revolution of the modern twenty-first century are difficult to keep up with and fully understand not only their make-up/construction and full-use, but also their implications on our society and culture as a whole. I too have been in doctored to see digital art as a acquired taste in the world of art, where the bridge between the physical and the unknown (or that of the cyberspace and digital realm) are blurred, and frightening. I believe it these very fears of digital art and its role in society which causes critics and audiences to question its role in the art world, and to construct rigid assumptions and rules for the medium, something Bishop argues we must destroy and to begin to “question art’s most treasured assumptions” (12). Bishop offers a lens
Claire Bishop sets out to examine the idea the largely the genre of “digital art” has been ignored and somewhat consciously forgotten by the world of contemporary art. Bishop also suggests that much of the ideology and history behind the “digital revolution” is also reduced, removed, and ignored; that digital art poses the necessary questions to our society today on the “troubling oscillation between intimacy and distance” (1) and that digital art “proposes an incommensurability between our doggedly physiological lives and the screens to which we are glued” (1). Bishop argues her point that not only is the art of the “digital art movement” itself significant, but that so many art movements (performance, social practice, assemblage based sculpture) also owe much of their inspiration and roots in the time of the digital art revolution (2). In reading this I found much sympathy for the role of the digital art in our present-day society and that a possible avenue of ignorance towards it is it’s significance in our everyday worlds, separate from the realm of contemporary art. The mediums of digital art, the tools we have come to advance in a technological revolution of the modern twenty-first century are difficult to keep up with and fully understand not only their make-up/construction and full-use, but also their implications on our society and culture as a whole. I too have been in doctored to see digital art as a acquired taste in the world of art, where the bridge between the physical and the unknown (or that of the cyberspace and digital realm) are blurred, and frightening. I believe it these very fears of digital art and its role in society which causes critics and audiences to question its role in the art world, and to construct rigid assumptions and rules for the medium, something Bishop argues we must destroy and to begin to “question art’s most treasured assumptions” (12). Bishop offers a lens