Digital Dialogues

The divisions between the digital and analog worlds has become quite blurry over the past 15 years or so. As computer technology becomes increasingly integrated into our everyday lives, cell phone ring tones that sound like old fashioned telephones, and light boxes mounted with photographs that emulate the computer screen are common-place. Simple things such as these are evidence that these two radically distinct worlds are not mutually exclusive, but entwined in a dialogue of imitation and emulation that goes beyond mere stylishness. When approached in relation to each other, we see that we have entered a frontier of “new media” that may prove to be at the heart of its phenomenological core; the manifestation of objects that whose distortion of perception occurs on the borders between these two worlds.

The entire scope of art that ranges from photography, sound and video, to sculpture, painting, and print making have all been drawn into this dialogue, and to deny it's relevance is tantamount to embracing ignorance. The separate specific issues related to discrete practices in all media share a common thread that defines the relationship between analog and digital technology. There is a powerful tendency toward simulation, or illusionistic enhancement. A powerful Post-modern urge take that which was thought of common place and everyday and elevate it to an epic status. In a sense, creating functional and very real objects of an abandoned and false technological utopia. But perhaps there is such a thing. Perhaps this dichotomy that exists is a step closer to that goal, and we have only begun to scratch the surface. The age of pluralism will not last, and there are new disciplines emerging that are not restricted to a designation of a particular medium. Sound was one, Virtual Architecture is yet another. What we MUST attempt to communicate are how to articulate the creative possibilities inherent in a new and complex world of digital tools and artefacts that’s sole purpose up to this point has been only to simulate reality for entertainment purposes. We, as New Traditionalsits intend to communicate to our audience, the power of these tools to create new worlds and the artifacts of those worlds to establish a more appropriate context for addressing proper aesthetic issues: authenticity, genius, originality, social functionality, ethics, romanticism, pragmatism. These universal aesthetic principles are forever at the heart of our enterprise and shall perenially reflect our own relationship to a brand of technology that has come to dominate our physical world.

We hope to inspire others to approach this medium with a similar attitude and inform their own aesthetic values and explorations.