Accepting digital as a medium

Let’s say you make an awesome and profound interactive experience, one that is meant to run off a computer. This experience is pretty wild, and you are really proud of it. It’s a little too abstract to be put in the design realm, and it has so much to say it takes it out of the league of ‘really clever programming’. It appears that you have just made art.

You have two choices of how to share this art with the world, and only one of them allows it to actually be accepted as art.

An appropriately snobby art gallery responds to your inquiry, loves your idea and wants to set up an installation. You tell them that all they need is a computer. They are not impressed.

They are under the impression that you will be making all active efforts to mask the fact that it is ‘only’ a computer-controlled experience. This is how your dinky little computer program can actually be accepted as fine art.

You decide that this sucks. They are trying to turn it into something that it’s not. You tell them to forget it, throw the program up on a website where it can be viewed by anyone, anywhere in the world and call it a day.

The art world continues to complain that computer art is still ‘too computer-y’. You retire to your desk, continue making more awesome things and wait patiently for this narrow-minded generation to die.