Can hardly believe there is no more reader left to read! I loved the Olu Oguibe article and look forward to reading more. I find him to be such a lucid writer around ideas that can be quite convoluted. In previous work I've used the above image as a way into an exploration of technology, colonialism, and globalization. I think the question which continues to remain with me is what is the role of an art that arises necessarily from the technologies as well as the economic and environmental relations of globalization, particularly when those relations continue to manifest wildly out of balance with respect economic freedom and quality of life. In other words, I see these brightnesses emerge transnationally from relations of nation and it seems to me that digital art, if it can be adequately metonymized in the pixel, is a unique source and contributor in the accumulations of light emission globally. Is there a relation between "fine art" and the locations this map describes? I wonder if digital art has the ability to transform our patterns of energy consumption toward something resembling greater balance, away from such old and still racist dynamics.
“With great power comes great responsibility...?” And I sense so much potential in digital art when I consider its technologies and its history combined with that playful freedom from mere utility that encourages artistic and conceptual expressiveness in an inherently global context. The art keeps up with the technology. But yet, I am not simply utopic. Like Oguibe, I agree that much of the liberatory rhetoric coursing through the internet is misleadingly naïve. Utterances of “we” are highly contingent upon who is able to hear and respond to its call, share in its rewards. Yet the Internet perpetuates the notion of this almost miraculous place, a “global community” which in fact remains to many as mysteriously distant -a gated and labrynthine as any enclave of the ultra wealthy- that simultaneously remains in many vital ways a persistant and pressing economic burden upon the lives of many. Our notions of "global community" have not, as Oguibe demonstrates, realized their full liberatory potential.
In addition I noted Oguibe’s comments upon the Internet as a powerful epistemological system, especially this: “Indeed, the truth-value of information gathered from the Net is reinforced rather misleadingly by its essentially textual proclivity and in turn by the text’s historical and scriptural association with truth, especially in the West.” There is so much of interest to me in that statement as I undertake my research for my paper concerning the archive. What are the limits of digitality, given especially its seemingly limitless structure?
The longer I follow my own questions concerning globalization the more troubled I find relations, particularly epistemological practices between the West and all the remaining senses and locations of non-West. Text and its relationship to truth and the body are revealing in that they have both always been more vulnerable, or rather more contingent, than we are often misled to believe. So I am curious about globalization’s potential to continue to resolve the “non” between the West and the other into something less binary, where our sense of success and achievement do not arise at an other’s expense. I wonder whether “globalizeable” art, art deterritorialized from nation in particular, is part of the process. It makes me think of Benedict Anderson and I imagine the effect of print technology upon the proliferation of the nation and then extend the technology to include the digital only to consider the emerging and virtual potential for the imagine communities to come.
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