Digimodernism

Description

1. Alan Kirby:

"digimodernism is the name I give to the cultural impact of computerization. It denotes the point at which digitization intersects with cultural and artistic forms. Most recognizably, this leads to a new form of text with its own peculiar characteristics (evanescence, onwardness, haphazardness, fluid-boundedness, etc.). But there are wider implications which make digimodernism, though easy to sum up in a misleadingly quick slogan, a disparate and complex phenomenon. Digimodernism is the label under which I trace the textual, cultural and artistic ripples which spread out from the explosion of digitization." (http://digimodernism.blogspot.com/2009/08/another-interview-i-gave-long-but-good.html)

2. Ibid.

"The main theories of culture and society in the aftermath of postmodernism are: Nicolas Bourriaud's "altermodern"; Gilles Lipovetsky's "hypermodernity"; Raoul Eshelman's "performatism"; Robert Samuels' "automodernity"; and my own "digimodernism". Between them they range across art and architecture, information technology and the internet, sociology, film, television and literature. They discuss recent developments in America, Britain, Germany, France and Poland. All but one has been introduced in a book published in the past two years: they are new paradigms for new times. Taken together, they offer the first glimpses of an embryonic and fascinating world.

Digimodernism identifies as the critical event in contemporary culture the profound and shattering encounter between computerisation and the text. Its most recognisable form is a new kind of digitised textuality - onward, haphazard and evanescent - that disrupts traditional ideas about authorship and reading, and is found on Web 2.0, a range of applications and in the video game. It connects this to shifts in "old" media, such as the digitally driven restructuring of cinema's reality system, visible as much in auteur films like Lars von Trier's The Boss of it All (2006) as in blockbusters like last year's Avatar.

In television, the traits of the digimodernist text are reproduced through reality and interactive programming. They are also found both in digital art and in work such as Antony Gormley's One & Other installation, held in London's Trafalgar Square last year.

Tracing the violent and irrevocable impact that digitisation has had on all forms of the text, on one hand digimodernism studies structural upheavals such as the supersession of the music album by the downloaded track, the revolutions in print publishing and the enhancements in access that have brought about what has been called a second golden age of radio. On the other, it sees across the media landscape a shift towards textual infantilisation, the apparently real, earnestness and narrative endlessness." (http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=411731)