[Rhizome]SOFTWARE ART SPACE. SOFTWARE ART?!?, Digicult article online tomorrow on Digimag July/August Issue, by Marco Mancuso

SOFTWARE ART SPACE. SOFTWARE ART ?!?
by Marco Mancuso - Digicult Director
http://www.digicult.it
http://www.digicult.it/digimag

This article will be published tomorrow in Italian on the July-August double
summer Issue of the online monthly magazine Digimag, inside the New Media
section. This issue will be translated in English at the mid of July for
Digicult international readers

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:::Tu hai un grande potere in mano ragazzo
hai il potere della scrittura.
Usala, rompi sempre le palle
all'ordine costituito
Ettore Sottsass - 2003:::

You can bet on it. As soon as the news gets around through reference
mailing-lists, word of mouth, international festivals, interviews by the
most acclaimed critic or curator of the moment, infinite will be the praises
raised to Software Art Space (www.softwareartspace.com), the second
operation performed by Steven Sacks, founder of the phantomatic Bitforms
gallery: digital in conception, but with a physical (micro) headquarter in
New York. In that same city and neighborhood, Chelsea, in which an
apparently infinite army of galleries and exhibition spaces devoted to
contemporary arts seem to be struggling to be part of the quadrangle between
4th and 5th streets, determining the destinies of the international art
market.

Fooling around is useless. As useless is the tell-tale reminding us that
praises and criticisms will come about: real critiques would be hard and
direct, not pats on the shoulders to constituted order. So the next question
arising is: why is a project whose aim is to diffuse art to the masses
(notice how the authoritative Wired magazine defined Sacks as he who
"brings software to the masses") criticizable? Well, we will try to explain
the reasons by analyzing the project under various points of view.

I would say that a good starting point could be the nature of the project
itself, its philosophy. If "bringing software art to the general public" is
the project's final ambition, I wonder how exactly Steven Sacks is expecting
to acheive such a goal through the use of the technological instruments
currently in commerce and through the use of any multimedial fruition tools:
graphics, sound, image and interactivity. A simple analisys reveals how the
ingegnous technological device requires having a dedicated PC in the living
room, in the bedroom or, possibly, in the bathroom, an ergonomic wireless
mouse or a practical touchscreen, readily available at the grocer around the
corner, and, obviously, the cd/dvd on which the artwork's executable file is
installed. Someone could possibly overcome my skepticism and convince me
that a high number of persons around the world will decide, tomorrow, to buy
online an artwork by Golan Levin, Casey Reas or Lia, and to exhibit it into
their house, rarely playing with the interactivity and generativity of the
object. This idea of "fruition" ignores a general trend that is commonly
accepted among multimedia professionals: multimedia and interactive products
guarantee a low level of emotional involvement when experienced at home,
amidst everyday life, without creating a diect and interactive experience
with the technology and with the condition of sensorial immersivity that it
can and must generate.

And for everyone seduced by the mecenatist aurea exposed by any project that
hides a blatant act of commercialization behind utopian conceptions of
horizontal diffusion of digital arts, we remind that each of the 10 artworks
in the Software Art Space catalog costs exactly 150 euros. We could discuss,
as usual, about "who decides" which artists will gain ufficial recognition
amongst the internationally "respected" critics and curators: with all the
respect to all of the pioneers called to join Software Art Space, some of
which i personally know and regard with human and professional respect, some
of the projects are really scarce, evaluating them in comparison to the
general level of quality of the other artworks on the market and in
comparison to the value .of the artists themselves. The quality of the
selected works also makes me reconsider the curatorial choice, or even the
artist-gallerist relationship, culturally and economically distant from the
ocean of digital and software artists working on a daily basis to find a
adequate mix between art, technology, experiment and communication. This
generation of artists feeds the underground circuits and keeps them alive.
This is the only real area in which some experimenting is going on. A soul
that is full of life, and that leads electronic arts despite any of the
spasmodic shots at "officialization" and "aknowledgement".

Another thing that truly surprises is the choice of the commercial "cost" of
the works. 150 euros are nothing in the rich and consumist western world;
what a noble value is, thus, given to the digital work of art? A part of the
contemporary art professionals have been trying for years to find a
compromise and a dialoge between their world and the one of the underground
generation of electronic art. To acheive it they decided to borrow the base
practices of the art market and to apply them to digital experimentation:
you decide the price of an artwork and the artist's cutural value gets
automatically transformed to an economic one.

A fundamental doubt arising from such an operation sounds like: letting
software art inside mainstream art necessarily creates the need to translate
into prices and quotations the work of the artists, despite the identity of
these forms of art? Is establishing the equivalence "work of art = money"
really a process that is necessary to bring software art to the general
public? (together, naturally, with all the other forms of electronic arts).

Taking for good that this process is really unvoidable and that the general
public will tune in its antennas on an artwork only if it has a pricetag:
how comes that the works of artists that are amongst the best and the best
internationally known in one of the most active areas of digital arts get
sold at totally laughable prices? It looks as if Sacks' operation should and
could produce other perspectives and ambitions. Or, maybe, we could feed the
suspect of thinking that producing 5000 pieces of a work and to sell each at
150euros, times the 10 works in catalogue, constitutes a mere search for
profit, despite the presence of a wider discourse that is more open minded
and that deals with the commercialization, the exhibition, the diffusion and
consequent survival of artists, curators and professionals that work in the
world of new media art, all without great financial sustainment, to use an
euphemism?

Fixing a price of 150euros for works that should allow the entrance of
software art in the galleries and art market circuits, addicted to way
higher price tags, doesn't seem like an action able to offer to the general
public a perception of the artworks as representative and selected from a
cultural process in act, the process of digital creation inside contemporary
art. The probable risk is that the art merchant or the gallerist deciding to
buy one of the works offered by Software Art Space will not have the
perception of having bought a work that is representative of software art,
an area of contemporary art, but of a (possibly) good product at a
reasonable price.

It's a law of the market: a mediocre price such as the one proposed by Sacks
doesn't represent a quotation and, thus, it doesn't fit into the
contemporary art market, it doesn't identify the works of art as such, but
as a consumer product. Sacks' operation is ambiguous: the fact itself of
deciding a price tag defines a distance between Software Art Space and the
underground circuits; at the same time the economic value assigned to the
works is not sufficient to cause its entrance in the world of contemporary
art. The process of cultural value attribution doen't seem successful or, at
least, it is poorly readable. The objective data remains: every work is a
product on sale on a website, to be bought and consumed on your PC.

Thoughts immediately flash to the many other international software artists
that will be seduced by Sacks' project, because the chimera of widspread
profit is clearly visible, especially for a generation of pioneers that have
made precise economic and not-economic choices in their lives, trusting a
form of art and of communication that is establishing itself in these same
years, inside a context without a market and without a structured
distribution. From this point of view I understand and accept Steven Sacks'
Software Art Space project.

On the other side I ask myself what future can such an operation have, which
sense can it bear in the wider context of new media art and its distribution
and commercialization, its cultural value.

Maybe when I ask myself these questions I already have some answers. I ask
them to everyone who has read them up to this point. I ask myself what
hundreds of software artists have to say, those same artists working with
code all around the world, experimenting, getting their hands dirty, trying
to find ways to use their art as a source of life and minimal economic
profit. I ask myself these questions and i sincerely hope that someone has
responses for me. Possibly even Steven Sacks, I will try to contact him. But
I know that there are no answers, only diverging opinions and different
artistic and professional territories, different interests and views on the
world.

But being able to open our eyes wider allows for some space for justified
doubt, remaining open minded and ready for a fast change of opinion… or
for its extreme radicalization.

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Marco Mancuso
Digicult Director
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Ripa di Porta Ticinese 39
20134 Milano - Italy
Mob. +39.340.8371816
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www.digicult.it
www.digicult.it/digimag
www.digicult.it/digipod
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