Response to Future of (Digital) art papers

If ‘digital’ as a prefix will disappear, will ‘reality’ as a suffix as well? Where boundaries are blurred and, perhaps, dissolved, are others necessarily erected? We have seen that as technology and transport allow commodities, money and people to cross national boundaries, those boundaries have legislatively and administratively tightened.

What will become of personality, identity? If we can transplant faces, why not personalities, minds? Maybe cryogenics is not the way towards immortality, but a personality transplanted into cyberspace.

What will become of choice and freewill? If a character we create for SecondLife can carry a camera and shoot a film, what if a camera can be implanted into the pregnant womb? Surrogate recipients can survey their developing foetus – and maybe the foetus can do the reverse. What would that mean about ‘when life begins’? What would that mean about choice – what if a foetus could reject its parents prior to birth?

Is there a possibility of the death of the artist with this supposed equalitarizing (just recall who actually has access to the technology versus who has never used a phone) of art production in the way critics have signalled the death of art (we lost aura, we lost reality, we lost the canvas…)? Or is the individual artist collectivised or will she be further commodified? Perhaps we will trade in artists, rather than in art?

What will become of galleries and museums, projects of empires past? With growing calls for the return of artefacts to their place of origin (although ‘origin’ is a contentious idea too, just look up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_of_Saint_Mark, the [now copies] of statues of horses that adorn St Marco, Venice). Maybe physical international travel will become unviable (until teleport arrives) and the way to see artefacts and painting will be to construct a virtual gallery of our own with our own openings and commentaries. What indeed will become of the value we place on ‘ownership’, ‘creator’, ‘origin’ and ‘originality’ in an ever more intertextual world?