Everything is new. The social and cultural context that creative people, artists, and for that matter humans, live in is exceedingly newer with every passing day. This is due to digital material, the Internet and Virtual Reality. As with all new technologies and things, these digital interfaces have a way of influencing how we think, act, perceive, understand and otherwise see our selves, challenging the previous standards and notions of how things have been.
Progress comes in waves, but this time around things are very, very different. It really comes down to our consciousness as it has been developed by the materials which formulate the environments and worlds around us. For a very long time, more than a few thousand years, our external world, the environment we adapted from, was matter made, or comprised of atoms. Further more, material was of some degree either hard or soft, and we, being the manipulators of the natural environment, molded, fused, burned, twisted, melted, bent or any other number of action words, changed those materials to suit our survival and technological needs. The environment and the materials came before us.
Now though, we have a very different medium and that is bits, code, ones and zeros - digital text, forms, and space as seen on screens - also known as the Internet and VR. This medium is untouchable and yet has had such a profound impact on us and our lives. That statement alone may appear transparent, but could also be considered the most improbable. How does a non-material entity influence anything? In what ways will we have to shift our understanding of natural studies? Will there be a day when we have Virtual Studies, Virtual Philosophies, or Virtual Sciences? This material we produced, and with it we produce unnatural environments, virtual realities we live in to some degree.
Artists have been working with the influences of VR for some time now. The technology was rudimentary in the late 1970's though 1990's, but today it's getting more common, influencing our way of thinking. Digital technologies, including the Internet, are re-formatting how we interact with each other, but furthermore, it is challenging our notions of identity in major ways. It is also changing our notions of basic foundational elements such as form and space. As there is no delineation between digital form and digital space, as they are both produced from bits, the notion of self also loses distinction as it exists in digital environments. What digital entity separates the notions of me, a chair, and the space between the two, if it is all coded with the same material, literally produced with the same kind of non-material? Furthermore, how does a digital material, a non-material, an untouchable entity, distinguish one idea of what a person is from another? What is the color of digital skin?
Here-in-lies a unique situation for the artist. What does one focus on if everything is the same and infinitely possible? What distinguishes focus, characterization, and furthermore, what establishes judgement? It used to be that an artist had a point of focus of which to culminate a confidence around or for. The artist had a particular interest based in a material, a process, or even a concept could help them to separate some thing from the other. And that is how things were. Things were able to be separated, focused on, studied, and held accountable unto themselves. This is based on natural studies and categorization.
The influence of digital material and VR nullifies this objectified reasoning. Digital material is an amorphous blob. Code is code is code. It is neither hard nor soft. It is our naturally formed inclinations that relay a false illusion of sameness between a coded chair and the coded living room it "resides" in. This amorphous material creates amorphous thought as well as amorphous and unfocused perception.
It is one thing to have a confidence in one thing and do that as an artistic practice, whether that be a material, a process, or a concept. It is quite another thing to try and grow a confidence around the entirety of all things, at all times, all at once, all of which are rendered with the same material and produced with the same process. Where does one begin? Where does one end?
