There are many clichés in the art world, and one of the most common is that digital art is almost exclusively the domain of young nerds passionate about computers and technology—or, worse, a pretentious offshoot of the vast universe of memes and so-called “memesthetics,” which emerged about twenty years ago with the rise of the first social media platforms. It is true that, with intellectual honesty, the conspicuous NFT speculative bubble between 2020 and 2021 intertwined with phenomena close to gaming and computer graphics. But it would be shortsighted to reduce the matter to this. Digital art actually boasts a history spanning several decades, populated by top-tier artists and pioneering experimenters who fully belong to the contemporary art scene.
Throughout this long and glorious trajectory, digital art has often intertwined with its older sibling, media or multimedia art, in a path of innovation accompanying humanity’s daily relationship with emerging technologies. Yet, despite advancing together, art and technology have often neglected the two central themes that have always nourished creative production: the conceptual and the poetic dimension of the work. For this reason, today, digital or media artists can claim the right to define themselves, fully, as “conceptual artists”—perhaps even more conceptual than the “old” conceptual artists—since they operate with the immaterial as the primary element of their creation.
This is the case of Andrea Paoli and his digital work As Above, So Below, inspired by the famous passage attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. Paoli uses immateriality to explore a new contemporary duality that no longer opposes the earthly world to the “higher spheres,” but shifts the conflict to the highly relevant ground between what exists outside the screen and what exists inside it. The play on the particle “is” becomes a refined ironic and philosophical device, capable of creating a dialogue between the plane of being and the phenomenal, in a post-human reinterpretation of Parmenides’ thought.
For those still unconvinced, consider Coral Sonic Resilience, a project by Italian artist Marco Barotti, a leading figure in the Berlin media art scene for years. The work consists of underwater installations that send sound signals to coral reefs to help regenerate them. And what do data and computing have to do with it, you might ask? The sound produced by these fascinating underwater totems comes from a complex—and surprisingly lyrical—processing of shamanic chants collected by the artist worldwide and transformed, via Artificial Intelligence algorithms, into a therapeutic symphony for sick corals. The result? It works.
What could be more poetic and conceptual than a work that uses AI to attune to nature and heal it? This is the kind of art we love.
