The Body in Digital Art

Sadie Plant’s discussion of art in the digital age or digital art, specifically in the “Tact” chapter, is very interesting in relation to her discussion of the current state of the body. Plant discusses how we are in an age that undermines the previous traditional separation of “science and art, means and ends, individuated creativity and expertise, isolated media and areas of specialized knowledge and experience” (198). The fact that now “hierarchically arranged systems of knowledge and media find themselves increasingly interconnected and entwined” (186).

The most basic definition of digital art and new media art can be consolidated to art created by a new media technology. The tool of these new forms of art is then some technology. Plant discusses how tools have changed in the digital age. She gives a primitive definition of tools as more or less a variation on a stick or an object to create distance. The safe distance tools provided no longer functions because tools have become extensions of our bodies with new technologies. However, this transformation is productive in art as it brings back the “tactility of woven fabrications” (185). With this “tactility” art then communicates the way “touch,” communicates as ”interplay of the senses” (185). If art acts as “touch” and the tools are extensions of the body, then skin no longer acts as a border between the exterior and the interior as it had been previously.

But, does digital or new media art “touch” its viewers through this interweaving of previously separated elements, tools and artists? Or does it point to something more like the “synaesthetic, immersive zone in which all the channels and senses find themselves embroiled in the “unclean promiscuity of everything which touches, invests and penetrates without resistance"” (186)? What does this mean for the state of artists, spectators, authors, etc…if the body is no longer a protective border between inside and outside, tools and artists, images and spectators?

I would highly suggest looking at the work of new media artist Jeanne Jo, who is teaching at Brown this semester, for her work with yarn in relation to Plant’s discussion of weaving and femininity. (http://www.jeannejo.com/)