One significant thing about the postmodern era is that in it, humanity’s communal spirit – our relationship to culture and society – has undergone a distinct change of direction. Like the sudden turning of a tide, this relationship has shifted, from something organic, where traditions and ways of doing and believing have trickled down to us over millennia, to something […]
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Recently, Sotheby’s made history by auctioning what it called ‘phygital’ artworks for a record price. CryptoPunk pixel-art pieces sold for $11.8 million in a ground-breaking move by the auction house. “These five fantastically rare ‘phygital’ punks form a very important bridge between the physical and the digital… This is where the digital artworld meets the traditional.” – Sotheby’s, 2021 But […]
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I’m sat in my car, in Royal Wootton Bassett, watching people walk by – doing the people-watching thing. The town gained its Royal prefix as the notorious site of an organic ceremony; the repatriation of dead Iraq veterans on their way from Lyneham airfield. Pub owners and their patrons would gather outside to raise a pint to the hearses; bikers […]
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“There was a time when it was not technology alone that bore the name technē… Once there was a time when the bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful was called technē. And the poiesis of the fine arts also was called technē… [t]he arts were not derived from the artistic. Art works were not enjoyed aesthetically. Art was not […]
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Until the development of the first technologies, humanity’s encounters with the replica were restricted to the organic. Even then, true replicas they were not. A blade of grass, growing next to a thousand others of the same kind that share some key characteristics (but are never identical) have what Wittgenstein would refer to as family resemblance. Choose any acorn and […]
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Let me ask a vexing question, that appears to have a simple answer: why has digital art struggled to flourish until now? One problem has always been uniqueness: the copying of a JPEG or Bitmap could never be prevented, for what is being copied is the actual thing itself. Digital copies are not prints; they are literal copies of the […]
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