The Digital Revolution will not be PDF'd.
Back to the future with LACMA's survey of the digital revolution.
Neelon Crawford, Reconnaissance Il, 1987, photogravure. © Neelon Crawford.
If Futurism is a statement about what the whole world will be like— “Someday, everyone will have a Thneed!”—where does the artist fit into the story? Is she a monk, kindling the old ways apart from and ignored by the world? A criminal outlier, the human glitch in the digital perfection? Is she the prophet of the next wave—the meta-futurist? Or maybe the function of art is fully absorbed into the warp and weft of popular design—no longer artists, as Carolyn L. Kane writes ominously, not even producers or consumers of content, but now simply “users”?1
LACMA’s Digital Witness offers a euphoric, if tentative, answer. That the title comes from a a song by St. Vincent is revealing: the arc of digital art’s rise over the past 60 years has been futurist in its engagement of popular culture rather than high art. Everyone will toil in the digital factories and consume digital culture, it seems to imply, so art and entertainment become indissolubly mixed. Curator Britt Salveson, in an impressively concise tour of a dizzyingly messy space,2 signals this mixture with signposts like Ridley Scott’s ads for Macintosh, Andy Warhol’s brand ambassadorship for Commodore, and Merriam-Webster’s embrace of the verb “photoshop.” The show isn’t chronological, but an extensive timeline in the catalogue gives shape to an evanescent discourse. (If you didn’t see the MTV logos in the 1980s, you can’t remember them. Weirdly: in cyberspace, you had to be there.)
The picture of the digital scene that emerges is comfortingly like the rest of the artworld: there is a corner devoted to using the new toolkit for the old aims, a corner devoted to exploring formalist problems at the edge of those tools; a corner for nostalgia and a corner for doomsaying. The formalist investigation of the digital aesthetic turns out to be fascinating,3 but it’s the meta-critical doomsaying that has the longest shelf-life.
“Bearing witness to the past,” Anuradha Vikram intones, “is only meaningful if the observations gained can be applied to a more equitable future.” What is the point of view of the artist in the digital age? Disembodied, floating above the discourse, just beyond it—whether with futuristic dread or shiny optimism, a unifying quality of Digital Witness is its beyond-ness.
Neelon Crawford’s Reconnaissance II4 summarizes the witnessing as well as the beyond-ness. The image began with a bomb’s-eye view of Manhattan before being digitally and mechanically overlaid with data representing the blast radius of a nuclear weapon. The black-and-white proto-glitch aesthetic underscores Cold War nostalgia en vogue in pop culture,5 but the work, along with some of the toothier entrants in Digital Witness, has a dynamism and currency that even the wildest painting is unable to conjure. Does Jackson Pollock evoke existential dread? Maybe. But Digital Witness is chock-a-block with it.
Vikram isolates “capitalist realism” as “the disappearance of cultural alternatives to Western-style capitalism since the fall of the Soviet Union,” and that glancing historicization feels eerily present. With the world in a state of self-immolation on an unprecedented scale, the glitchy update of Cold War anxiety feels like the bleeding edge.
“Artists in the coming generations must continue to envision alternatives to capitalist realism if we are to survive it.”6
The operative word in any futurist program: “if.”
Thanks for reading. Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film is on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through July 13, 2025.
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Carolyn L. Kane, “Data and Style” in Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film, Delmonico & DAP: Los Angeles, 2024, p. 168.
I read the catalogue in tree-carcass format but I’d bet COMMAND+F would reveal a high occurrence of the word “dizzying.”
Eg: “To understand the emergence of glitch art, we must turn back to the early years of digital color, when using it was a problem of programming. A similar situation arose with datamosh-ing, where at first an artist needed to manipulate digital video codecs to get their desired results. The compression algorithms used to engineer digital video formats-like MP4, MPEG, and MOV-divide data into three different frame types: I-frame, P-frame, and B-frame. The I-frame (interframe), or reference key frame, indicates a significant change in content, such as a shift in scenery or sudden movement, and is thus the most important key frame. P-frames (predictive frames) and B-frames (bidirectional frames) are used to maintain consistency. Datamoshers exploit this logic by deleting select I-frames, leaving only the "filler" P- and B-frames so the rendering algorithm does not "understand" how or when to properly shift, and thus simply moshes content together, creating the liquid but chunky blocked effect definitive of the genre” (Carolyn L. Kane, p. 170). See? Fascinating, and surprisingly so!
Digital Witness, p. 75.
I can’t be alone in hearing Kraftwerk in Chappell Roan, right? This is a thing, yes?
Anuradha Vikram, “Bearing Witness: The Evolution of Capitalist Realism in the Digital Age,” in Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film, p. 208.