June
2000
The
Future of Digital Art
An
Interview with H-Ray Heine
Sergey
Teterin:
Hello
H-RAY, I am writing about digital art for www.artinfo.ru.
In the next number I want to touch upon the subject "How a Net-artist can
sell (offset) his art".
How
can one sell net art?
H-Ray
Heine:
To
my mind, the answer to this question is developing as we speak. The internet
already has revolutionized the way art is experienced and distributed,
and it will also change the ways in which art is sold.
What
I envision is a situation where collectors purchase digital art in the
form of downloads, very similar to the way in which software in general
is being sold.
It
is not difficult to develop of system of editions in which, for example,
only 100 copies of an interactive work are available for purchase. Each
download would have its own encrypted serial number, etc.
For
those art collectors who insist on something more tangible, CD-Roms and
DVD will provide an alternative medium.
Sergey
Teterin:
What
can be considered the original and, for example, how it can be "passed
to a private collection"?
H-Ray
Heine:
The
concept of an "original" is difficult to apply in digital media. One of
the essential characteristics of digital media is its (virtually) infinite
capacity of loss-free duplication.
Further,
through the new feature of interactivity, a single work can also have an
infinite number of manifestations, since the output of the work is determined
by a combination of random funtions and user interactions, making it impossible
to predict what the work will look like each time it is activated.
One
of my recent digital works - Thought
Generator
- combines words to create simple sentences, commands, or haiku poems,
using random functions to select words and phrases from a set of word categories
that each contain between 7 - 20 words, and the output is somewhat unpredictable
and different for each observer who interacts with the work.
In
other words, there is no "original" output of the work, since this varies
each time the code is called, but there is, of course, the original code
or software.
Similarly,
the idea of an "author" looses much of its currency in digital media. A
collaborative sitework on digitalsouls.com: generation/mutation
v.2.1 is composed of the contributions of a large number of artists,
each taking a single digital image as the starting point for their individual
work and returning it with their individual modifications.
The
work as a whole, however, (the site), even though clearly original, does
not have a single author but a collective of contributors and has become
possible only through the use of the net.
Sergey
Teterin:
Who
among Net-artists manage to sell any Net thing successfully?
H-Ray
Heine:
I
don't know of anyone personally, yet... It is just a matter of time. The
artworld needs to develop mechanisms and practices that allow it to integrate
new media art into its realm, but it will happen. |