Quoting Rachel and Monica a few days after the bizarre Friends’ reunion may seem like grotesque opportunism. However, for me, it really is the end of an era (and my best and oldest friend and I used to chime the phrase at each other ad infinitum back in the day, so it’s an habitually familiar one that leaps off the proverbial tongue at any given opportunity).
After six and half years, I completed my Open College of the Arts degree and am waiting for the results of the final module, while also hoping all goes well enough to take up an MA offer in September. One of the last things I will do with the OCA is give a talk to a group who have, rather flatteringly, invited me to speak about my final project, why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers/ and the presentation choices I made. I could focus on mishaps and blunders, something in which I am terribly well-versed; if there is a mistake to be made, rest assured, I am bound to make it. But while I might touch on that briefly, for the sake of self-effacing humour, I am going to discuss the fortuity of being forced by Covid into presenting most of my work online in the final stretch of the degree. (Where anything wasn’t online, it was produced using economic but impressive digital services.)
I say fortuitous, because had it not been for Covid I may not have invested so much time and effort in the digital presentation, and instead, prompted by habit, created a physical installation. Which would have been a bit of a cop out on my part, since the project is an inquiry into the ongoing transformation from an object-dominated paradigm towards one that operates based on seemingly intangible, and entangled, digital processes. (They’re not really intangible, by the way; regardless, for the sake of the planet, the selling of mass-produced products is being, and needs to be, replaced by the delivery of widely available services (Perez and Schafer, 2021)). Tied into this, in my work, there is a question around photography which has long been associated with the fetishisation of the object, and continues in that vein. Many well-intentioned photographers and lens-based artists insist on privileging analogue processes over cheaper, widely available and therefore more democratic ones. Not only that; the fact that the digital world is visibly run and heavily funded by some less than well-intentioned people and organisations encourages an apocalyptic view which tells us digitisation means the end of civilisation itself. Extraordinarily unhelpful behaviour from a range of people in the Twitter-sphere can make all of that hard to counter.
For a variety of reasons, digital manifestations are seen by some artists as second best. However, if we are really going to tackle the current ecological crisis faced by humanity, we are going to have to accept that the fetishisation of objects has to end. Nevertheless, from where I stand, all I see is the continued dismissal of digital in favour of film, which, given the implications around access and the state of the planet, seems almost as nostalgically bizarre as the Friends reunion.
That isn’t to say unfettered digitisation is the answer to our many problems. It certainly isn’t. The recent tulip-mania like fervour around NFTs and the subsequent collective acknowledgement that most crypto currency is desperately expensive in terms of energy is a case in point – incidentally, I suspect the discussion around NFTs and related processes is far more complex than we might assume at first. However, at my talk for the OCA next week, I shall be discussing my use of digital technology and why we really have to stop and think about what we’re saying when we dismiss it as clunky, second-best, even ugly, or ‘lacking in poetry’. What and who are we shutting down, silencing, when we promote that view?
So, yes, it really is the end of an era for me. But that also means I am at the dawn of a new one, which will be filled with doubts and many more mistakes, as well as some positive and satisfactory moments too. And maybe, just maybe, it’s time to consider the value systems which inform our views about film and digital processes as the world continues to navigate this extremely turbulent and at times perilous but unavoidable paradigm shift.
Purpose, U. I. for I. and P. (2021) Is full global development the silver bullet?. At: https://medium.com/iipp-blog/is-full-global-development-the-silver-bullet-73dcdb7b2c82 (Accessed 03/06/2021).