P𝐢x𝐞l D𝐮s𝐭
P𝐢x𝐞l D𝐮s𝐭
What’s the obsession big galleries have with flying particles?
It’s starting to irritate my eyes.
Like dust.
Flying particles. Light trails. Big galleries in the post-AI era are obsessed with them.
Experiencing ‘Works of Nature’ by Marshmallow Laser Feast, I was wondering why it left me so cold.
There was clearly immense technical mastery on display; incredible image capture, synthetic generation of visuals, moments of data gorgeousness.
But aside from the interesting tension at the heart of the work – experiencing the natural world through flat screens, rendered through an entirely technological framework – I wondered about this expensive, set-piece new media obsession with floating pixels.
You know what I’m talking about. For the past few years, less imaginative major galleries have looked to emulate experiences like TeamLab’s projected digital art.
Done well, when it was fresh, it could feel novel and immersive. A new language.
Now, it all too often feels a little try-hard… an act of desperation to embrace new media instead of just hanging a painting or commissioning a performance. A flattened, dead aesthetic of pixels flying around, light trails, algorithmically-generated data dust.
It’s already starting to feel like a dead aesthetic.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the work of Refik Anadol – more for his philosophy of data painting, of trying to draw magical expression from raw facts – but we don’t need a million of him. And for sure there are other synthetic art aesthetics – the early generative, smeared-faced GAN pieces by Mario Klingemann and all that.
But these all still feel like tentatively early expressions of new technology. Perspectives totally enmeshed in their medium.
Look! We are digital! these exhibitions seem to say. Look upon the vastness of our screens and the precision of our pixels!
Non-native institutions suffer the most from this aesthetic predictability.
In embracing new media and synthetic art, there must be something reassuring about dark rooms with big screens and nothing but pixel dust.
For us, though — we need to keep pushing the boundaries of how these new forms can augment and enhance mixed media work, instead of distracting us from our smartphone screens with… bigger screens.
STACK, which debuted this year, shows the potential. Combining experimental real-time performance with immersive AV, it was delivered ephemerally as part of Acquired Taste in New York.
Even in video it delivers 10,000x more gut punch than any self-regarding screen-based big gallery art I’ve seen.
This is what we must demand of the new era.
There’s a Brian Eno quote doing the rounds about the flaws of a medium –
“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. ”
Maybe in the future, we’ll long for the floating pixels and light trails of what some unimaginatively think of as digital art.
But I think we’ll most probably crave the best expressions of hybrid forms.
Works that do something with the tech, not just showcase it.
Ones that centre aesthetic resonance… blood, spirit, imagination, craft, soul… and where the pixels are incidental.
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