April 15, 2014
In “The Digital Divide”, an essay published in late 2012 by ArtForum, Claire Bishop outlines a split between digital art and the contemporary global art market. While this article was particularly contentious in digital art circles, Bishop asks a couple of great questions for digital artists: “ While many artists use digital technology, how many confront the question of what it means to think, see, and filter affect through the digital? How many thematize this, or reflect deeply on how we experience, and are altered by, the digitization of our existence?”
My ongoing Blogmix series of videos has been a personal attempt to grapple with these issues of how digital technologies are filtering and altering my own thought processes and experiences of the world. This series, started in 2010, grew out of my active involvement on the micro-blogging platform Tumblr. An important aspect of Tumblr is its Dashboard setting, which allows instant updates of content posted by other users, as well as a way to re-post or like that same content. Re-posting or liking this material then creates a kind of archive in your own blogging space. For years now I have been following posts by over four thousand users, which means a nearly constant flow or turnover of images, articles, and interactions.
An important aspect of my perception of the internet is that it creates an experience of one seemingly random image after another. Over time this randomness seems to have patterns, but randomness and novelty is built into the experience. In 2010 I started using screen capture software that allows me to record a given area of my computer screen. This software, as well as the use of the browser scrollbar, allows for the creation of a kind of visual montage. The voiceover in Statement [https://vimeo.com/65839198] represents another attempt to verbalize the impulse behind my blogmixes. Statement is featured in the wonderful traveling show The Festival of (In)Appropriation [http://festivalofinappropriation.org/?page_id=1086].
Coupled with my interpretation of the web as one random image after another, is another formal or structural concern. Recently I have started thinking about how much time I and many other people online spend staring at bright colorful rectangles. No matter what the content is inside those rectangles, we spend a great deal of time staring at desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone screens. I am wondering more and more what it means to box our perceptions in this way. Blogmix (Center Pixel Prototype) [https://vimeo.com/81301119] Is an early prototype for this more recent direction in my work.
The two videos connected to this brief reflection represent thin slices of a much larger ongoing body of work. More of this work can be found here: https://vimeo.com/channels/514590.
Bio
Justin Lincoln is an experimental artist and educator. He is a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University (BFA 2000) and CalArts (MFA 2002.) He teaches New Genres & Digital Art at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA. Justin is a prolific presence online and his work shows extensively in international exhibitions and screenings. For the last few years he has been making generative art using video, the micro-blogging platform Tumblr, and the programming languages Processing and MaxMSP/Jitter. He is fascinated by the feedback loops and mediation created between people and their networked online tools.