The party’s only over when the conversation dies
The party’s only over when the conversation dies
Pattern and noise, feat. Dither
Are you hearing voices?
I have been, for some time. I’ve tried to.
ULTRA is about the future of art, and part of that is how art is experienced.
How we find it, discern it, share it; how different kinds of work, especially fringe work, becomes part of our lexicon.
For many of us, discovery is an accident; we might hear about a great piece from a friend, walk past an open door, or there’s a blockbuster exhibition on every other billboard.
And yeah – art is my favourite way to waste time. Each moment you choose to engage, you might encounter nothing, an aesthetic moment, or a seismic internal shift. I’ve already said too many times <sigh>, something-something pathway to transcendance, so maybe I’ll put it another way: other than fucking, the visceral experience of art is the best way to get rich without money.
At its simplest, Dither is an app that serves my desire for hyperstimulation.
(After all, art should be communed with in first person as much as possible.)
Artist-led, designed to be as seamless as possible, it’s a cleanly put together, comprehensive, and useful directory of everything being shown, and everything that was shown. If you live in the cities it serves, it’s valuable. It breaks the dependency on Meta and Instagram; it gets you out of the chokehold of the most privileged galleries, it allows space for voices that are irreverent and provocative and weird.
And it’s this last part I love most – a new model for participation.
The feed and the forum are equalisers. Experienced critics matter as much as new enthusiasts; major galleries are on the same footing as small, artist-run indies; artists, curators, visitors all chat shit on the platform where anyone can have an opinion about the art they’ve seen.
Smaller art markets like Australia have their pros and cons. The country’s physical separation from the world, its small population and shoestring budgets create an intense crossover space of styles and sub-groups that are the killer ingredients of beautiful creative scenes. Plus Aussies are isolated and weird and cosmopolitan; a vibrant melting pot for weird shit.
In that sense, an art-focused amalgam of Instagram and Google Maps and Foursquare (yep, old school) is a beautiful way to collapse physical and digital worlds. One step away is also one tap away. The conversation takes place in two states simultaneously.
One obvious trade-off of a small market, of course, is that the power dynamics are intensified; most people would rather build bridges than detonate them, and that tends to blunt public critique. Sometimes a metaphorical grenade is required. On Dither there’s room for disruption and dissent… excoriating the laziness of another Dale Frank on the wall, or wondering when rich collectors might give up an obsession with tired clichés.
How can you not love this potential for disruption?
The founder of Dither, himself an artist who is clearly an assiduous student of the building of scenes – reminded me that the word itself, dither, is also a technical image-processing term. It uses diffusion to add depth to a picture, scatters pixels in a way that is both noise and pattern. Mostly it is valued because it is a way to break the limitations of an image, add colour.
…
For sure there is more room in the cultural conversation, between stultifyingly dense theory from academia, and vacuous, Instagrammable fodder from artists and makers who feel forced to be there. Both of which I’m amenable to – but junk food isn’t for everyone, every time, and neither is soup.
Shared cultural thrives when the discourse is current and vibrant and alive and participatory. All thoughts are immortal until they’re forgotten.
The party’s only over when the conversation dies.
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