Art, Life, and Technology, Through Time and Space

The space between digital life and real life continues to fade and nowhere is this more apparent than in arts and cultural contexts. Facilitated by digital capture and curation, social media, the network, Internet, and the web, these forces combine to empower artists to be digital curators of their own work, giving voice and narration to their artistic expression. In the paper entitled Digitalism: the New Realism, the authors focus on how digital tools and technology have changed ways of doing, knowing, and being, while here we look at how today’s digital landscape is changing ways of artistic expression, narration, communication, and human interaction. The growing use of digital tools and technology in the arts and culture is dramatically transforming traditional curatorial practice and by extension archival practice, so that we are moving from a gatekeeping model to an open model steeped in digital relationships across global networks and the Internet. As we immerse ourselves in the digital world, where anyone with a smartphone can be a digital curator and marshal a range of Internet services, such as Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and more specifically for example Behance (for online portfolios), artists are enabled to freely engage and interact with their audience using to their advantage crowdsourcing, “likes”, chat, blogs, games and email. Emerging artists are particularly expert digitally and are able to curate their life and work directly, living naturally between physical and digital states. To demonstrate this, our study presents specific examples of how artists and GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museum) institutions are adapting to new digital ways of curating collections and conveying meaning. Additionally, we show how notions of what constitutes artistic expression are evolving as art traverses digital media boundaries, especially in terms of visual and textual media. Importantly, as life in the 21st century plays out on the digital stage of the Internet, artists and GLAM institutions find themselves more than ever working at the intersection of art and information which is leading to new and innovative ways of curating contemporary art that are expressive of artistic vision and digital aesthetics, while conveying social and political meaning capable of influencing and impacting our lives.

This one-day Symposium explored themes of personhood, modernity and digital art, bringing together speakers from a range of disciplines to consider technology, artistic practice and society. It seeks a renewed consideration of the role of art in illuminating human identity in a positive relation with technology, and its transformative effects upon space and time. The concerns for the role of art amidst the forces of a post-modern world are influenced by important legacies of the past, by which ideas about human identity and difference have been made meaningful in the relation of history and technology. In the frequently transient and conflicting forces of humanness and forces of modernity, the digital world of the arts emerges as a means by which new ideas of space and time can be considered, with new perspectives of human identity seen as states of being, towards the possibilities of experience, technology, individuality and society.

In 1901 L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz , imagined a kind of augmented reality (AR), viewed through spectacles, that could indicate specific characteristics about a person invisible to the naked eye. Today, AR allows artists to place virtual elements: videos, 3D graphics and audio, into the physical world, providing “mixed reality“ experiences that can offer new perspectives on identity and subjecthood in the twenty-first century. This paper will highlight how I have implemented selfie vernacular and augmented reality technologies as storytelling devices in identity construction. The drawings and expanded AR narratives in The Selfie Drawings , a mixed reality artist’s book, are an inventory of how a self, both the physical and virtual body, can be perceived in the Digital Age. Using 2D and 3D elements in my work, fragmenting the body, attaching it to, or intertwining it with digital augmentation devices, I am pondering the state of existing simultaneously IRL and URL in symbiotic relationships with technology and mediated culture.