“Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture“:
Digimodernism put simply, is the impact of computerization on all forms of art, culture and textuality. It is also the dominant cultural force field of the 21st century, the successor to a postmodernism which reigned supreme throughout the 1980s and 1990s but is now widely felt to have had its day.
Digitization has revolutionized traditional arts, invented new cultural relationships, and slowly engulfed the textual world we live in.
In late 90’s and early 2000’s new technologies permanently altered the relationship between authors, texts, and readers, succeeding postmodernism as the primary cultural milieu.
Because of new media, audiences now have unprecedented ability to alter the content of texts, reducing the role of the traditional single author and making texts unstable and ephemeral.
Digimodernists texts are characterized by “onwardness, haphazardness, evanescence, and anonymous, social and multiple authorship.”
Prime examples of digimodernist texts include the internet as a whole, blogs, reality television shows like American Idol where viewers decide the narrative progression, news programs that rely on viewer-submitted comments, etc.
Replacing the uncertainty or self conscious irony of postmodernism, the typical emotional state of digimodernism is the trance, being completely absorbed in and becoming the text.
I found the ideas presented by Alan Kirby to be useful when situating my artwork in relevant and contemporary context, for example when looking at the debates of post-internet art and the controversies revolving around new media. An objective of my work is to promote discussion and speculation on these particular movements and technologies place in the art world. One particular area that I find interesting concerning in Kirby’s work is the relationship between authors, and how that now. with the internet, works of art can be altered and authorship can become lost.
