- Record: found
- Abstract: found
- Conference Proceedings: found
‘No Culture No Future’: Virtuality and Its Discontents Reinvented
Abstract
When Lithuania, along with much of the rest of the world, went into a nationwide lockdown amid the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the late 2020, the situation for the country’s culture and arts sector seemed to be worse than during the first quarantine. Although there was already substantial know-how necessary for mitigating the negative effects of the closure of physical spaces and live events by transferring cultural content online, there was a growing sentiment that it was not enough. With institutional plans halted and most events streamed on the Internet, it gradually became clear that the ‘digital culture’ niche which had been in the making for several decades was perceived by the cultural mainstream largely as a supplementary layer for the conventional offline, face-to-face, ‘real’ cultural life, rather than as equivalent to the latter.
While artists, institutions, and cultural producers were exploring mediated formats of reaching the audience and (re)discovering the potential of digital media, symptoms of a ‘digital fatigue’ were becoming increasingly evident. Several months into the quarantine, the Lithuanian culture community adopted the slogan ‘No Culture No Future’ and called for opening up the cultural sector for live, unmediated activity despite of the difficult epidemiological situation. The professed reasons for this were not so much economical but instead quasi-spiritual, based on the idea that it was precisely culture and art that ensured the society’s mental well-being (and thus resilience against major crisis like a viral outbreak), to the point of being prescribed as a kind of ‘medication’ in some countries.
This situation prompts some important questions. What are the implications for the longstanding fascination with the ideas of telepresence and online creative practice in at least some milieus like media art or net art? Has the sudden compulsory virtualisation of all cultural activity rendered these earlier fantasies completely irrelevant and even inappropriate? Or is it a case of cultural ignorance/amnesia that points to the still obscure status of the practices and discourses of art and technology, new media art, network art and digital art within the larger context of contemporary culture? Looking at some conflicting notions of virtuality in the different art worlds and periods, the article seeks to critically reflect on the related value systems and provide some thoughts on whether the international digital culture movement of the 1990s–2010s has any legacy that is widely recognised as legitimate and influential.
Content
Author and article information
REFERENCES
E Shanken A. (2015) Contemporary Art and New Media: Digital Divide or Hybrid Discourse? Art Research Journal, 2 (2), 75–98.
J Bosma (2021) Pandemic Exchange: How Artists Experience the COVID-19 Crisis. Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam.
L Cornell and E Halter (2015) L Cornell and E Halter (Eds.) Mass Effect. MIT Press, Cam-bridge.
Paul., C. (ed) (2016) A Companion to Digital Art. John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken.
C Paul (2010) Context and Archive: Presenting and Preserving Net Art. In: D Daniels and G Reisinger (eds). Netpioneers 1.0 – Contexu-alizing Early Net-based Art. Sternberg Press, Berlin/New York.
D Quaranta (2013) Beyond New Media Art LINK Editions, Brescia.
M Tribe and R Jana (2006) New Media Art. Taschen, Cologne.
(2020) Turning the threat of COVID-19 into an op-portunity for greater support to documentary her-itage. UNESCO. http://en.unesco.org/news/turning-threat-covid-19-opportunity-greater-support-documentary-heritage ( 30 August 2021 ).
C Bishop (2012) Digital Divide: Contemporary Art and New Media. Artforum. http://www.artforum.com/print/201207/digital-divide-contemporary-art-and-new-media-31944 ( 30 August 2021 ).
C Connor (2013) What’s Postinternet got to do with Net Art? Rhizome. http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/nov/1/postinternet ( 30 August 2021 )
L Cornell and B Droitcour (2013) Technical Diffi-culties. Artforum. http://www.artforum.com/print/201301/technical-difficulties-38517 ( 30 August 2021 )
C De Braekelee and I Thomas (2020) Culture in Wider Europe: ‘More open in a closed-down so-ciety’. The British Council. http://www.britishcouncil.org/research-policy-insight/insight-articles/culture-wider-europe-closed-society ( 30 August 2021 )
B Droitcour (2014) The Perils of Post-Internet Art. Art in America. http://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/the-perils-of-post-internet-art-63040 ( 30 August 2021 )
M Etxebarria E. (2020) Culture After the Pandem-ic. InterArts. http://www.interarts.net/news/culture-after-the-pandemic ( 30 August 2021 )
Feinstein L. (2020). ’Beginning of a new era’: how culture went virtual in the face of crisis. The Guardi-an.http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/apr/08/art-virtual-reality-coronavirus-vr ( 30 August 2020 )
S Heidenreich (2016) Freeportism as Style and Ideology: Post-Internet and Speculative Realism, Part I. e-flux. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/71/60521/freeportism-as-style-and-ideology-post-internet-and-speculative-realism-part-i ( 30 August 2021 )
Kantor A. and Kubiczek J. (2021) Polish Culture in the Face of the COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis. Journal of Risk and Financial Management, 181 (14). http://www.mdpi.com/1911-8074/14/4/181 ( 30 August 2021 )
G Lovink (2007) New Media Arts at the Cross-roads. Diagonal Thoughts. http://www.diagonalthoughts.com/?p=204 ( 30 August 2021 )
G Lovink (2020) The anatomy of Zoom fatigue. Eurozine. http://www.eurozine.com/the-anatomy-of-zoom-fatigue ( 30 August 2021 )
H. W Mak, M Fluharty and D Fancourt (2021) Predictors and Impact of Arts Engagement Dur-ing the COVID-19 Pandemic. Frontiers in Psy-chology, 12:626263. http://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.626263/full ( 30 August 2021 )
H Steyerl (2013) Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead? e-flux. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/49/60004/too-much-world-is-the-internet-dead ( 30 August 2021 )
A Vierkant (2010) The Image Object Post-Internet. Jstchillin. http://jstchillin.org/artie/vierkant.html ( 30 August 2021 )
M Wright (2021) Fighting online fatigue. Arts Professional. http://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/magazine/article/fighting-online-fatigue ( 30 August 2021 )