'Whoever would be born must destroy a world,' wrote Hermann Hesse, words from another era which still bear weight on the life cycles of new technologies.
The term `born digital' broadly refers to materials such as text, images and recordings that have only been created in digital format, though the definition sometimes also stipulates that the work cannot subsequently be transferred into physical form, such as a PDF to printed page. The Kunsthaus Zurich’s current exhibition, Born Digital: Video Art in the New Millenium, attempts to track the moments of transition between analog and born digital video art between the years 2000 and 2005, beginning with analog work such as Christoph Büchel’s 2000, La Suisse existe, which recorded the millennium speech of then Swiss president Adolf Ogi on VHS in the spirit of artistic piracy. Composite videos, such as Rita McBride’s 2003/2004, Mae West, a proposal for Effnerplatz, Munich, Germany, combine analog footage with computer-generated graphics, while other works recorded on Digital Betacam or completely fashioned from CGI, such as the hypnotic The Reversed Armory by Yves Netzhammer and Bjorn Meljus, fall towards the other end of the technological spectrum.
There is appealing simplicity in curating from within a sliver of time, but the rigid scope draws attention to other ways in which this selection seems incongruous. Works like Cao Fei’s 2004 Cosplayers feel jarringly out of place among a primarily Swiss lineup of artists, particularly as scenes of costumed Chinese teenagers roaming metropolitan Guangzhou flash by. The other two foreign artists, Americans Diana Thater and Rita McBride, are less visually disparate but still elicit questions as they are placed alongside unmistakably Swiss works like the humorously nationalistic I love Switzerland by Com&Com and Forum by Lukas Bardill and Gabriela Gerber which edits snapshots of helicopters at the World Economic Forum at Davos.
Time weighs heavily on this exhibition, defining it physically and conceptually. There is, of course, the time captured and encapsulated in every video, the total sum of which equals the number of hours it would take to fully view the works and the burden of every video-based presentation, a demand on the viewer’s time greater than any other medium. There is also the marked attention to this five-year time period and the turn of the millennium. But above all, the organizing principle is archival; this exhibition exists as a result of a two-year conservation project within the Kunsthaus’ digital collection which has in that time grown to encompass media art. The exhibition underlines the frailty of these formats which we know all too well – the libraries of VHS, betamax, CD, or DVD, so quickly made inaccessible, the files that fail to open on new computers, or become corrupted, or are lost—making special note of recent efforts to digitize and maintain older file formats before they become so outdated as to be unreadable.
Here we come to what I find to be the most compelling aspect of the exhibition: what might be inferred by its presentation this year. Throughout history, art has overwhelmingly been about commodities. Oil paintings to this day retain a financial value that allows them to be traded in lieu of money, or makes it possible for interested parties to invest in shares of their estimated worth. Media art and now, born digital new media art, holds a value closer to that of information — it is their content and context, rather than the ownership of a copy of it which is the true prize. It follows that the investment of resources in media art preservation speaks to a different set of values than that of physical art preservation. For the Kunsthaus, an institution synonymous with canonical art, it is a nod to a moment when resources are not only allocated to retaining a hoard of priceless and collectible objects, but also to the conservation of more ephemeral works that embody our era of innovation and fragmentation. It's ironic that in our Information Age, with a host of formats promising to keep our words and images alive forever, many more memories are lost in the rise and fall of new technologies than were ever lost in an attic or kitchen drawer. Few of these files and mechanical relics will be excavated, even fewer will be preserved. Hesse spoke truly, around us an immeasurable number of worlds are blooming and blotted out all at once.
Born Digital. Video art in the new millennium, Kunsthaus Zürich, 7 June–29 September 2024