The Obsolete Matters

Digital Art Reflecting on Itself

A group auction curated by grebenshi, hosted by accomparts on objkt.

Digital art has been admitted, and admission carries a cost. The verdict it once passed on the physical arts now falls to it: having a history makes a practice vulnerable to obsolescence. A medium that inherits the legacy joins the same line, giving up whatever structural advantage it held over its parent and receiving a past in exchange.

Art infers the appearances of reality and gives them back. Once that is granted, these languages can turn the operation on themselves — take their own existence into account and close the circle, each according to what it is made of. The collection opens that circle to all of them: generative systems, artificial intelligence, 3D, digital painting, code, phygital, and the hybrids nobody has named yet. One origin holds them, and it counts for more than everything that separates them.

That origin is the past in question, and it is what the admission failed to recognise. These languages were let in at the exact moment the digital stopped being one available configuration of the world and became the way the physical world is experienced — screens, servers, the half-attended room. The institution dated the practice and overlooked what the practice was evidence of.

The transformation carries implications of far greater reach than they appear to at first. They begin at the distribution model, in a file with no original, every copy the work, and no mechanism inside the material that says otherwise (this auction acting as if there were one, like every other). From there they reach into the practical behaviour of things made of computation: weightless, ubiquitous, unworn. And they end at the core of art's functions, at its role as interpreter of the visible universe.

A universe becoming digital and explored through digital lenses. A history observed from the standpoint of history. A present moving into the past. Oneself becoming obsolete.

The title carries both readings. Matters as a noun: obsolete things. Matters as a verb: the obsolete counts. What is gathered here is a tribute paid to that world — the digital world, seen through the lenses of digital art — and an attempt at reflecting the transformation.