Friday, July 19, 2019

ARTivism In An Age Of Algorithms


“Perchance memory, this enigmatic, unphysical object, is but an aperture into the elsewhere. an unaltered alternate we never can pin down – of that which time is smashing together in an eternal cauldron of the NOW”.

What is art to me, in an era of digital interfaces and what seems to hinder our art practices from traversing beyond the palatable; towards the bizarre potential of unfiltered imaginations?

I ponder this question, more complexly as I grow old, wondering if surviving the onslaught of the fourth industrial revolution will be a long-shot for artists?
Is it because our contemporary art practices seem possessed by an innate shortage of complex vocabulary to define our paralyzed inner engines, or have artists themselves become numbed by the trampling speeds of technology infused social mutations?

It appears that of late, our canvases are only torn by discordant caricatures of plagiarized brush strokes and eco-friendly oils mixed for kitsch walls of patrons. Our books have become redemptive billboards served as sedatives for those who abandoned the human condition for glass houses harangues about a litany of isms?

And there is another riddle - hallucinatory euphoria of instant exposure that social media purports to afford the artist.
This momentary desktop activism only shoves into the face of a society that has already discarded art into the peripheral spheres of social engagement, a simplistic world-view based on simplified art; which in turn is taken for a concrete reflection of our times.

When the art world should resist all whims of corporatization and commodification, it has rather opted to mirror the self-serving narcissism of its creators, in that all patronized art seems to yearn to be property of the elite.  Across a diverse range of art-forms, we are noticing a lackluster attitude and disregard of esthetic continuity aligned with social revolutions.

Dumile Feni’s audacious liturgy of curvatures, Dyani’s lucid aural dissidence in music with a broad spectrum of lush sounds, and even Gwala’s haunting voice diligently pacing minds toward some arcane ritual with their spliced memory – all these revolutions ignited by geniuses of yester-year, seems to have vanished from the contemporary psyche, and therefore post-millennial artistic expression.

But why this unnerving scarcity of unadulterated artistic expression of dissent, and only an endless series of recycled spectacles to appease the status quo? Be it music, film, and the fine arts, art seems to be a mere tool of erasure, dis-remembrance and glossing over traumatic psychic violence of a technologically sinister age of photoshopped fake news and memes that make charity campaigns from horrors?

Perchance the answer might lie in another question, and that is: “What is the most potent method of suppressing traumatic memory content derived from disconcerting social participation?”
Forgetting.
Yet forgetting is inevitably a process of replacing divergent memory content with the more palatable.

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